Post by Sharon Faulkner on Sept 4, 2007 16:17:56 GMT -5
Swimming to Europa
By Jean Kumagai
A robot designed to explore Mexican sinkholes is pointing the way to Jupiter's watery moon
DEPTHX is the brainchild of Bill Stone. With a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Stone worked for 27 years as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md., where he specialized in industrial automation. Since 2005, he’s also had his own company, Stone Aerospace, in Austin, which has been focused exclusively on building the DEPTHX robot.
Of the countless engineers who as children read the fictional adventures of Tom Swift and dreamed of becoming the fearless explorer-inventor, Stone is arguably the one who actually did it. Tall and lanky, with hawkish features and piercing blue eyes, he is probably best known for his exploits, chronicled in National Geographic and other magazines, in some of the world’s deepest and most dangerous caves. Not uncommonly, those expeditions revolved around sophisticated technology of his own design and construction.
He’d spend weeks underground, pushing to, and occasionally beyond, the limits of endurance. Many of the DEPTHX team members, in fact, are old caving buddies of his. Marcus Gary, the project manager and a geology Ph.D. candidate at UT Austin, is a caver. So are John Kerr, lab manager for Stone Aerospace, and Vickie Siegel, a geologist and part-time staffer.
Fascinated with caves since childhood, Stone learned to scuba dive just so he could explore water-filled caverns. Frustrated with the limits of diving gear, he spent years and most of his savings designing a rebreather, an intricate and ingenious piece of engineering that recycles a diver’s respired air, scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and adding oxygen and other gases as needed to let him stay submerged for up to 24 hours.
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Field notes, photos, and other information about DEPTHX are available at the following sites:
Stone Aerospace, www.stoneaerospace.com/news-/news-latest.php; the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University, www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/project/depthx; and the University of Texas, www.geo.utexas.edu/zacaton/depthx.
To see the slide show and video clips from the El Zacatón expedition in May, go to www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/depthx.
Read the full 4 page article.
By Jean Kumagai
A robot designed to explore Mexican sinkholes is pointing the way to Jupiter's watery moon
DEPTHX is the brainchild of Bill Stone. With a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Stone worked for 27 years as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md., where he specialized in industrial automation. Since 2005, he’s also had his own company, Stone Aerospace, in Austin, which has been focused exclusively on building the DEPTHX robot.
Of the countless engineers who as children read the fictional adventures of Tom Swift and dreamed of becoming the fearless explorer-inventor, Stone is arguably the one who actually did it. Tall and lanky, with hawkish features and piercing blue eyes, he is probably best known for his exploits, chronicled in National Geographic and other magazines, in some of the world’s deepest and most dangerous caves. Not uncommonly, those expeditions revolved around sophisticated technology of his own design and construction.
He’d spend weeks underground, pushing to, and occasionally beyond, the limits of endurance. Many of the DEPTHX team members, in fact, are old caving buddies of his. Marcus Gary, the project manager and a geology Ph.D. candidate at UT Austin, is a caver. So are John Kerr, lab manager for Stone Aerospace, and Vickie Siegel, a geologist and part-time staffer.
Fascinated with caves since childhood, Stone learned to scuba dive just so he could explore water-filled caverns. Frustrated with the limits of diving gear, he spent years and most of his savings designing a rebreather, an intricate and ingenious piece of engineering that recycles a diver’s respired air, scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and adding oxygen and other gases as needed to let him stay submerged for up to 24 hours.
--------------------------------
Field notes, photos, and other information about DEPTHX are available at the following sites:
Stone Aerospace, www.stoneaerospace.com/news-/news-latest.php; the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University, www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/project/depthx; and the University of Texas, www.geo.utexas.edu/zacaton/depthx.
To see the slide show and video clips from the El Zacatón expedition in May, go to www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/depthx.
Read the full 4 page article.
