JAXA Creates Camera That Can See Radiation 49
New submitter Ben_R_R writes "The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has created a camera that can 'see' radioactive contamination by detecting gamma rays emitted by radioactive cesium and other substances. The camera has been tested in the disaster evacuation zone around Fukushima. The image captures levels of radiation in six different colors and overlays the result over an image captured with a wide angle lens."
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
The big difference is that a scintillator or geiger tube is equivalent to a simple eye that just detects light levels. That can't be used to create a usable image. I suspect they have something like an insectoid compound eye going on.
Re:Where is the data? (Score:5, Informative)
I saw the camera on NHK World and it is not what you may think is camera sized. It is a big cube with about 1 m sides. It also includes a small optical camera, so that you get a composite of the visual picture and the gamma radiation distribution. It is supposed to be used to check the buildings in contaminated areas and see where the radioaktive material is located.
Re:Resolution and effectiveness? (Score:5, Informative)
Geiger counters tell you if there's radiation at the counters sensor. This lets you measure/see where the radiation is coming from.
Re:Where is the data? (Score:5, Informative)
Better pictures and video here (Score:3, Informative)
On one picture you can see how the visual image and the gamma radiation agree at the corner of a wall. You can see that the radiation spot turns 90 degrees with the bottom edge of the wall and how the radioactive materials kind of puddled near the bottom of the wall. It's cool to see that the two images agree.
Also there is video of the actual camera which is pretty big and not so portable. You probably want to keep it in a car most of the time.
http://www.japanprobe.com/2012/03/30/camera-can-see-radiation/ [japanprobe.com]
Original article has more details (Score:4, Informative)
The English article edited out some information that was in the Japanese article.
Currently it doesn't tell you the precise amount of radiation being emitted but you get an idea of the highs and lows from it.
The technology that was developed for a detector installed in Japan's next-generation astronomical observatory satellite, the Astro H, to observe gamma ray bursts caused by astronomical events such as old stars exploding into supernovae. JAXA's Professor Tadayuki Takahashi who developed it says, "I want to aim at making this a practical tool quickly." And here is the Prof. Takahashi's cool page [isas.jaxa.jp] and Japanese version [isas.jaxa.jp] which shows news items too.
You will find several English papers on his work by Google: "High-Resolution CdTe Detectors and Application to Gamma-Ray Imaging"
Finally there are links from the Japanese page to a lot of detailed info about the gamma ray camera, though in Japanese there are PDFs including with photos of the supermarket experiment: here [www.jaxa.jp],pdf 1 [www.jaxa.jp]. pdf2 [www.jaxa.jp], here [isas.jaxa.jp].