On Tue, 9 May 2000, Tom Schmitt wrote:
> I am begining to remember more about the device that was talked about at the
> meeting.
> 
> Some one said tens of millions of dollars.  I suspect that would be a
> minimum.  The device
> relied alot on technology that the Navy had been working on for decades.
> They had very precise
> accerometers in the 1950's.  Nuclear subs have used inertial navigation
> since the begining and that
> was in the 1950's.   The gradiometer had  GPS though, that was before the
> commercial units
> ( this was in 1984 or 1985).
> Tom Schmitt
> tschmitt@..............

Thanks for the extra info Tom.  I figured something like this would be
prohibitively expensive for our type of group.  Maybe we can ask Bill Gates
for the money.  Anyways, it seems that the only way we will ever find these
things in our hands is through either the generosity of the government (i.e.
donation of older instruments) or incredible advancements in accelerometer
technology.  Though the latter is certain to occur, we may all be dead by the
time it could apply to this problem for a small cost.  I am wondering if a
large university collaboration could be developed some time in the future to
appropriate one of these instruments and do something like this new USArray
deal; truck it all over the US.

The other solution might be to have S-T figure out a way to build this thing
from hardware store parts!  :-)

John Hernlund
E-mail: hernlund@.......
WWW: http://www.public.asu.edu/~hernlund/

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