Between 1952 and 1963 Britain tested nuclear weapons at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga, and plutonium from the minor trials is still in the ground. Charon maps those sites: terrestrial and aerial gamma surveys registered to 3D reconstructions, so that samples for Pluto can be taken where the dose is known.
Work so far
- Historical record of the British tests at Maralinga, Emu Field and the Monte Bello Islands: a schema-validated timeline dataset (63 elements) with all twelve major detonations dated to the day, the minor trial series, site markers and the cleanups and inquiries.
- Instrumentation: a Raspberry Pi logger fusing two RadiaCode gamma spectrometers with high-accuracy GNSS (in build), feeding a real-time SLAM 3D model with voxel estimates of radioactive sources.
- Designing a near-real-time reconstruction pipeline on feed-forward 3D models (DVLT, VGGT, Pi3, MapAnything) for two modes: live UAV capture (target under 10 s per update) and unordered survey sets of 1,000+ images.
- Tahmoor quarry survey: 1,680 images processed in ArcGIS Drone2Map and exported to COLMAP for Gaussian splat training; terrapin, a Rust tool (about 3,800 lines) converting BlocksExchange XML to COLMAP, nerfstudio and Bundler formats.
- Radiation safety and logistics for specimen transport: cast-bismuth shielding design, point-kernel dose estimates, cabin dose-rate maps, and off-grid field power (EcoFlow Delta 3 Plus with solar panels).
- ENVL2007 case study, Radiotrophs and Where to Find Them (June 2026): Gaussian splatting and low-cost robots carrying dosimeters for mapping contaminated ground.
Documents
- Project Charon: expedition proposal, version 5 (May 2026) PDF, 4.2 MB
- Radiotrophs and Where to Find Them: ENVL2007 case study slides (June 2026) PDF, 11.9 MB
Fieldwork depends on access permits and the agreement of the Traditional Owners. Site-located and radiological data are shared with collaborators only, on request: email me.