Designing Wireless Sensors To Be Dropped Into Volcanoes

Thorfinn.au writes with this quote from El Reg: "Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock. 'At the moment we have no way of accurately monitoring the situation inside a volcano and in fact most data collection actually goes on post-eruption. With an estimated 500 million people living in the shadow of a volcano this is clearly not ideal,' explains Dr. Alton Horsfall of Newcastle Uni's Centre for Extreme Environment Technology. 'We still have some way to go but using silicon carbide technology we hope to develop a wireless communication system that could accurately collect and transmit chemical data from the very depths of a volcano.'"

Next stop: Venus?

[RobertB-DC]

Venus, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, has proven a tough nut to crack for probes hoping to return information about its awesomely hellish surface. But if we're talking about a small probe that can transmit while bobbing around like a cork in a lake of liquid rock... well, mere "lead-melting" heat should be a walk in the park for that little critter.

Send a craft with a few hundred of these guys in its hold, drop 'em on the surface, and find out what's going on with our evil-twin-sister planet. I especially want to know what's going on with the Venusian highlands, where there seems to be a radar-reflecting "frost" of heavy metals [bbc.co.uk] coating the ground. Even if all these probes can tell us is how blisteringly hot it is, that's got to tell us *something* about the environment. Venus sounds like a metal-ore refinery, and I'd love for someone to decide that it's worth a few (hundred) billion bucks to go get some of that Unobtanium (or whatever) and bring it back to Earth.

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cooking sensors

[trb]

A hacker pal of mine worked at Tektronix in the late 70's, he told me this story. Tektronix made all kinds of oscilloscopes and electronic test gear. Apparently, they had a fancy special-purpose scope (cost maybe $10k/each), that they sold about 20 of each year. Suddenly, one company started ordering 4 or these scopes a month. This was surprising to Tektronix, and they had to change their inventory handling to deal with this change in demand. They decided to call the customer and figure out what they were using all these scopes for.

Turns out the customer was one of the research labs (LANL or something, I forget which). They were measuring nuclear reactions, and using these scopes because they had a particular kind of sensor, but the tests were destructive, and every time they ran the experiment (once a week), they vaporized a scope. I think they figured out a way to sell the customer the sensor without wrapping it in all the fancy scopey packaging.

Re:I don't think so

[idontgno]

Their in-depth chemical analysis of the lava in the volcanic caldera will reveal startling amounts of hydrocarbon and nitrogen gas. Someone will pin global warming on this, attempting to counter anthropogenic GW. Hilarity will ensue.