Jun 4 2009
A new type of deep-sea robotic vehicle called Nereus has successfully reached the deepest part of the world's ocean, reports a team of U.S. engineers and scientists aboard the research vessel Kilo Moana. The dive to 10,902 meters (6.8 miles) occurred on May 31, 2009, at the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.
The dive makes Nereus the world's deepest-diving vehicle and the first vehicle to explore the Mariana Trench since 1998.
Nereus's unique hybrid-vehicle design makes it ideally suited to explore the ocean's last frontiers. The unmanned vehicle is remotely operated by pilots aboard a surface ship via a lightweight, micro-thin, fiber-optic tether that allows Nereus to dive deep and be highly maneuverable. Nereus can also be switched into a free-swimming, autonomous vehicle.
"The Mariana Trench is the deepest known part of the ocean. Reaching such extreme depths represents the pinnacle of technical challenges and the team is very pleased Nereus has been successful in reaching the very bottom to return imagery and samples from such a hostile world. With a robot like Nereus we can now explore virtually anywhere in the ocean," said Andy Bowen, the project manager and principal developer of Nereus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). "The trenches are virtually unexplored, and I am absolutely certain Nereus will enable new discoveries. I believe it marks the start of a new era in ocean exploration."
"Much of the ocean's depth remains unexplored. Ocean scientists now have a unique tool to gather images, data, and samples from everywhere in the oceans, rather than those parts shallower than 6500 meters (4 miles)," said Julie Morris, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ocean Sciences Division, the principal sponsor of the $8 million project. "With its innovative technology, Nereus allows us to study and understand the ocean's deepest regions, previously inaccessible. We're very pleased with the success of these sea trials."
Aside from NSF, funds for Nereus have been provided by the Office of Naval Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russell Family Foundation, and WHOI.
The Mariana Trench forms the boundary between two tectonic plates, where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the small Mariana Plate. It is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometer (25,000-mile) area where most of the world's volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. At 11,000 meters, its depth is approximately the same as the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner.
To reach the trench, Nereus dove nearly twice as deep as research submarines are capable of and had to withstand pressures 1,000 times that at Earth's surface-crushing forces similar to those on the surface of Venus. Only two other vehicles have succeeded in reaching the trench: the U.S. Navy-built bathyscaphe Trieste, which carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh there in 1960, and the Japanese-built robot Kaiko, which made three unmanned expeditions to the trench between 1995 and 1998. Neither of these is presently available to the scientific community. Trieste was retired in 1966, and Kaiko was lost at sea in 2003.
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