It seemed like such a simple task to drive up and down roads with some radiation detection equipment, log the data and investigate any hotspots.
Well, I guess it was? Or maybe I'm severely underestimating the complexity of this?
Based of its stated radiation signature it was always going to be easy to find. Right, it was a simple but nuisance task and took about as long as expected.
not sure if this was a typo, but the phrase I'm familiar with is "hell to pay".
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/there...
Last week, I wrote 'we all cropped it' instead of 'we all copped it' which makes no sense—yet I reread that text three times, twice before posting and once thereafter and yet I still missed it.
I wish HN would allow typographical corrections past the usual edit deadline. Bad typos distract so they reduce the impact of what one is trying to say.
Thanks for pointing it out.
It's an interesting question how close one would have to get for the CMOS sensor to register notably in this instance. Given the stated radiation signature of this sample it's likely one would have to get pretty close, so it may not be a useful technique.
I can't recall having read anything about smartphone CMOS sensors and radiation thresholds so I'd be interested in hearing from anyone whose knowledgeable about the matter.
The odds for any one small object to get not only picked up but picked up and not tossed back out are astronomically tiny.
( Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623782 sounds like not too amazing :) )
Perth has a few companies that do this work for a living - as a grind job, flying contracts for an actuall million line kilometres of 256 channel radiometric mapping at anything from $7 to $15 AU per line kilometre for mineral exploration.
This has been ongoing for 50 years (see: Radiometric Map of Australia) and I'm slighlty baffled why a plane wasn't flown along the road on day one.
Realistic guesses are that all airframes were fully booked AND the national agencies wanted to shine and test their new gadget.
It's slightly complex gear to set up - but no more so than properly running the lines for a concert from pickups to to desk to foldback and main speakers, etc. If you can do one you can do the other.
Complicated is when you go and map some area in India near the Pakistan border and suddenly a surprise nuclear test happens beneath you .. which happened to one local crew .. but that's a whole other story.
It was all abit unexpected at the time and the US was interested to know how it came to be that Australians were present.
I dare say somebody might write it up well after retirement for release after death.
Things got ... interesting.
Contracted to a cutout company.
It just happened to be the first such survey in India and to coincidentally be at the exact place and time the area turned into an underground nuclear test site.
How badly were they hurt? Were they hurt at all?
Their diginity took a mild beating after landing and spending a month under quasi "friendly" house arrest by Indian troops who watched them gather more data and process it, compounded by questioning from US border agents in following years in transit, and offset by the joy of watch high caste Indian Geophysicists that insisted on being in the planes vomit on every end of line turn.
( It's a gut wrenching maneuver )
Telling them the planes weren't landing and they'd have to clean up their own mess "sparked joy", I believe.
Exactly. After reading the press release and how they promote their device, I'm not so sure this wasn't deliberate.
When an energetic gama burst hits a bit of crystal it flashes in a manner that gives up the energy .. over the course of a second and a few thousand events (normal background radiation) you have a spectrum [1].
You no have an indication of all the radiation all arounf the tube.
All around. With no indication of direction. Literally they could have come from anywhere, up, down, left, right, behind you, etc.
What we have here appears to be a vertical tube (or tubes) with mobile masking templates that rotate about and provide some axis of ingress information coupled with any energetic flahes that appear at the same instant.
There is some topographical statistics that needs to be performed and overall there are reduced signal levels (as some incoming gammas are masked and never make a flash) but you can end up with a positional image of where various radiation sources are in the space about the tube.
The other wrinkle they gloss over ('compressed', 'needs fewer counts') suggests (it's either obfuscated or I haven't read deeply enough) they have an eigen library of responses (ie. mean Australian background, Pure Potassium, Pure Uranium, Pure Thorium, Cs-137) baked in to facilitate faster recognition of spectrum patterns.
It's a pattern matching in N^256 type problem in a space that reduces to about N^11 or so when an SVD is applied .. and there are ways to "cheat" and do this faster on the fly.
https://radiascan.com/products/detector-of-ionising-radiatio...
The waiting time is few months, so I hope the toy arrives eventually.
It's going to take a good wind to blow that very far.
I'd love to see some re-enactments and the spread of the spots where the pallet ended up after being lost on step one, that might give some indication as to whether it was found near its original landing point or further away from it.