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We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus (arstechnica.com)
Planet Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. The surface temperature there is 470C (878F). This has been one of the key challenges that has prevented us from deeply exploring Venus. Normal chips can only function until around 250C, but it appears, we will soon have a computer that can withstand Venus' weather. From a report on ArsTechnica: Now, researchers out of NASA's Glenn Research Centre appear to have cracked the other big problem with high-temperature integrated circuits: they've crafted interconnects -- the tiny wires that connect transistors and other integrated components together -- that can also survive the extreme conditions on Venus. The NASA Glenn researchers combined the new interconnects with some SiC transistors to create a ceramic-packaged chip. The chip was then placed into the GEER -- the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig, a machine that can maintain Venus-like temperature and pressure for hundreds of hours at a time. The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the GEER had to be shut down.
"We Finally Have a Computer..."
"...we may soon have a computer..."
From the don't-count-your-chickens dept. ?
Maybe if we were talking about the Kelvin scale, but even then, 90x is a pretty meaningless way of comparing temperatures. Much better to maybe mention that at 470C:
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/period...
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Since supposedly men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, it's good to see they've finally created a computer that can survive women.
/ sorry, I'm not really sexist
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How, as an editor for a tech site, do you hire someone who can't even recognize a total goof in the summary intro? The PRESSURE at the surface of Venus is 90x that of earth.
I'd understand if you had one or two editors posting hundreds of stories a day - one might slip through. But you're barely posting one story an hour to the front page. How do you fuck that up?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't even want to know...
So Google says the average temperature on Earth is 16 C, or 289.3 K. 90x that is about 26,000 K.
The article (yes, I looked at it) actually says the pressure is about 90 times that on Earth.
Except 0 is arbitrary in Farenheit... Average Earth temp is 287 kelvin, average Venus temp is 735 kelvin. So really it's only like 2.5x hotter than Earth by any objective measurement. Otherwise you could say a 1 degree F day is infinitely hotter than a 0 degree F day and mathematically on an arbitrary scale, that would be correct.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
First, a computer is a whole lot more than just a chip. How about boards, wire runs, resisters, transistors? But the atmosphere of Venus contains massive amounts of toxic gasses. If we have a computer chip that operates at high temperatures, what is it made of and how quickly does it break down inside the atmosphere of Venus?
So not only don't we have a computer that works on Venus, we don't have chips that work on Venus. TFA says that they may have a chip that operates at high temperatures but since it has not quite been invented yet we can't test the viability of said chip in Venus' atmosphere. Not only am I cynical, but I'm really tired of the chronic hyperbole in seemingly everything.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The statement was "the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470C (878F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water".
It's the atmospheric pressure, not the temperature, that is about 90 times that of Earth
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Because nobody uses Rankine, except when pointing out it exists.
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Incorrect. Fahrenheit (like Celsius) is a relative measure, for you to measure 90 times the earth's heat (thermal energy), you'd have to use an absolute measurement: Kelvin. Let's do the math. 75 F (earth's temperature) = 273.15 K; 90 times that is: 273.15* 90 = 24,583K which corresponds to 43,789.73 F. It's hot there, but not THAT hot.
Uranus's core density is around 9 g/cm3, with a pressure in the centre of 8 million bars (800 GPa) and a temperature of about 5000 K.
(And yes, I get the obvious joke, lest ye "whoosh" me...)
Except 0 is arbitrary in Farenheit... Average Earth temp is 287 kelvin, average Venus temp is 735 kelvin. So really it's only like 2.5x hotter than Earth by any objective measurement.
Only if you assume a linear scale. Given how much of the interesting stuff happens near 0 K, and how little difference there is between 10,000,000 K and 100,000,000 K, I would think it would be better if we started treating temperature as a logarithmic scale.
Or, put another way, the 448 degree difference between 287 K and 735 K is obviously a lot less significant than the 287 degree difference between 0 K and 287 K.
That extreme pressure should keep them from exploding
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
One of the (smaller) reasons I dropped out of the ChemE degree I was pursuing was because one day in one of my classes, there was a number written on the board. We asked the prof what it was, and his reply was "That's the ideal gas constant, R. I wrote it there because we'll be using it today". We looked at him funny and said "No it's not. We use R all the time, and it's not that". "Well.... yes it is, but this is the value of R in the units atmosphere gallons per lbmol rankine."
While I appreciate the value of being metrically multilingual, for some reason that just seems horribly *wrong*.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
I just read that the clean-up robots at Fukushima can't withstand the radiation of the site. I wonder if this sort of improvement could be adapted to improve the clean-up hardware. Is temperature and radiation it the same kind of 'heat'?
Except, you're not surviving Venus's weather (btw Venus' would be the possessive for multiple Venu) you're only surviving the temp and pressure. The weather included sulphuric acid rain and other horrible environmental challenges. the temp and pressure are just two of the challenges.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
To be clear, we don't have a computer that can survive on Venus, or anything near that. What the research team made is a ring-buffer, which is a collection of maybe 20-30 transistors arranged in a big circle (with one inverter).
That's a very far cry from even an Intel 8080, which is approximately 4500 transistors. And that's without any RAM, Flash, or anything else. This is an impressive milestone to be sure, but it's nowhere near an Arduino (let alone a full computer).
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
NASA engineer: "Our grand heat-tolerant computer is reporting back the latest findings from the probe ... it confirms that all the scientific instruments are fried and not returning data."
Table-ized A.I.
470C? Oh please, my AMD chip runs at least twice as hot as that. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
For it to be obvious, you first have to know the significance. So what makes it significant to you?
Atoms moving vs not moving is more significant than atoms moving vs moving slightly faster.
Or, to put it another way, the difference between a plane doing 287 km/h and one doing 735 km/h is obviously less than the difference between a plane doing 287 km/h and a hill.
My problem with the name Uranus isn't that stupid, overused joke - it's the fact that it's the only planet named after a Greek, not Roman, god. It should have been Caelus.
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.