Roll up for the Alcator C-Mod virtual tour!
3 Jun 2014
The next best thing to actually walking inside a tokamak: embarking on Mumgaard and Bolin's virtual tour of MIT's tokamak Alcator C-Mod.
Opportunities to tour the inside of a tokamak are not very frequent. In order to share this unique experience, Robert T. Mumgaard, a grad student at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), and Chris Bolin, of Bolin Photography in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US) teamed up to develop a technique that delivers a spectacular virtual tour of the interior of Alcator C-Mod, presently the largest fusion reactor operated by a university.
At the end of 2013, as the machine was open for maintenance, they acquired some 1,600 high resolution pictures of the vacuum vessel that they later stitched together to form 360x180-degree projections.
Embarking on Mumgaard and Bolin's virtual tour of Alcator C-Mod is the next best thing to actually walking inside a tokamak—you can check for yourself on PSFC's website.