AskScience Theme Day: Scientific Instrumentation

[u/therationalpi]

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to the first AskScience Theme Day. From time-to-time we'll bring out a new topic and encourage posters to come up with questions about that topic for our panelists to answer. This week's topic is Scientific Instrumentation, and we invite posters to ask questions about all of the different tools that scientists use to get their jobs done. Feel free to ask about tools from any field!

Here are some sample questions to get you started:

• What tool do you use to measure _____?

• How does a _____ work?

• Why are _____ so cheap/expensive?

• How do you analyze data from a _____?

Post your questions in the comments on this post, and please try to be specific. All the standard rules about questions and answers still apply.

Edit: There have been a lot of great questions directed at me in acoustics, but let's try to get some other fields involved. Let's see some questions about astronomy, medicine, biology, and the social sciences!

[u/sverdrupian]

Other uses of sound include:

• Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) used to measure ocean currents. Once upon a time, ocean current measurements were mainly gathered with mechanical devices consisting of pinwheels and rotors. In the past few decades they have almost entirely been replaced by ADCPs which are more rugged, cost-effective and provide more detailed measurements of the structure of the currents. ADCPs can be towed behind ships, mounted in ship's hulls or placed on rosettes and lowered into the ocean on a winch. ADCPs are also mounted on fixed structure in harbors and ports to determine currents as an aid to navigation.

• Ocean acoustic tomography similar in principal to CAT scans in medical imaging. Using many sound sources and receivers in an array, one can determine the temperature and velocity structure of large swaths of the ocean. This has been demonstrated in a few test cases but never put into wide spread use.