Miniature gravity detector could peer inside planets
Peering beneath the surface of Mars and other planets to reveal buried geological features could get easier, thanks to a nifty new silicon gadget.
The device, called a gravity gradiometer, has been designed to measure how much the force of gravity changes from place to place, enabling it to map a planet's gravitational field.
The idea is simple. Take two masses, each hanging from a spring. If one mass is slightly closer to a planet's surface, it will feel stronger gravity and pull more on its spring than the other mass. Compare the pulls on the two springs, and you can work out the gravity gradient over that part of the planet. A gravity gradiometer aboard the European Space Agency's GOCE satellite is currently probing Earth's gravity field, but it has a mass of hundreds of kilograms. Being so heavy, it would be prohibitively expensive to send such a device on a deep-space mission.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
