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Robots may protect drinking water from terror attacks
A network of underwater robots beaming up a near real-time environmental profile of lakes, rivers and reservoirs soon be on the prowl helping safeguard the nation's drinking water from sabotage.
The robots would replace researchers who painstakingly collect water samples in bottles and take them back to the laboratory for analysis, an expensive, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous practice.
By summer 2005, Syracuse University researchers a dozen robotic sensors to form the largest underwater monitoring system of its kind in the country and one of the most extensive in the world. The project will cover more than 25 miles of the Seneca River and five connected lakes, including three municipal drinking water sources for more than 500,000 people in central New York.
Not too far off this technology will be able to serve as an early warning system to protect our waterways from terrorist attacks . underwater environmental monitoring programs are under way in Minnesota, Washington, Nevada and North Carolina. The key our water resources is real-time monitoring. These robots present an exciting opportunity to accomplish that.
The underwater robots are as a RUSS system – Remote Underwater Sampling Stations – developed in the late 1990s. The first systems were installed in 1998 in Ice Lake and Lake Independence in Minnesota. Syracuse launched its first robotic monitor in 1999 in Onondaga Lake, a federal Superfund that is considered the nation's most polluted waterway.
Here's how RUSS works: A mobile, underwater sensor package, tethered to a floating platform, contains an onboard computer, solar panels and telemetry equipment for position tracking. As the computer-controlled sensors move vertically through the water, they data as frequently as every 10 minutes on temperature, oxygen, turbidity, light and salt content. The data are transmitted via cellular phone signals to the main computer at Syracuse and posted on the Web. The information enables scientists to better understand the environmental systems at work and assess whether the water is suitable for consumption, aquatic life and recreation.
One of the system's greatest benefits its ability to track pollution as it occurs, letting scientists manage it and make informed, on-the-spot decisions.
The New York project is extremely well designed and will give scientists a deep understanding of how the different components of a lake interact. Still, the technology is not quite ready as an early warning system. Currently, the robots each winter. Scientists are working on a monitoring system that will rest on the lake bed and can be used year-round.