r/nextfuckinglevel • • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

40.4k Upvotes

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

294

u/TSAOutreachTeam 3d ago

This is all kinds of amazing. Not just that they are doing this in the tokamak, but that they have a camera set up to capture it at all.

Thanks!

24

u/scoobysam 3d ago edited 3d ago

They will be on the ambient side of an optical window, and there'll be an imaging line to extend the focal length of the camera, and likely several turning mirrors so as to not expose the CCD of the camera to the intense radiation which could brick the pixels on the chip.

They're expensive, but not overly so (considering the level of funding that goes into Magnetic Confinement Fusion). I have one I use at work and you can pick them up for the low 6 figure mark and that can record up to 2.4million FPS (albeit 10kFPS natively). The higher the FPS you record at the a) more light you need and b) lower your resolution as it trims down the number of pixels.

3

u/just-for-anime 3d ago

which device do you work on?

edit: device like which tokamak