The Jean Charcot rests comfortably back in her berth while the crew readies for the next leg.

Having your expedition cut short by weather is not a lot of fun. Aspirations that have been building for years are funneled into planning over months and months to pull all the necessary personnel and pieces of equipment together and the little details are astronomical in number. When it all comes together, it’s like a soufflé. Get the temperature wrong, add just a little bit too much of this or that, heck, look at it too hard and the thing will fall flat. When ya get it up and running the very last thing you want to do is shut it down for a week, no matter the reason. So many things can go wrong at that point. What if one of your key guys (and we have a few) has a scheduling conflict that cannot be avoided? The ship has a schedule and shoving everything back a couple weeks isn’t always a viable option. And then there’s the cost. 30 people flying home or spending a week in hotels? It ain’t hard to imagine the fiscal impact. I would say that Chris Davino, the president of RMS Titanic, has taken it in stride and with exceptional professionalism and aplomb. He has experience with water based operations from his early fishing days so he totally gets it and never once frowned at the reality of 2 hurricanes barreling down directly onto his meticulously planned project, but everything has a bottom line and his can’t help but be affected. Still, he didn’t miss a beat or hesitate. “Damn good job, do what ya gotta do and be back in a week” pretty well sums up his response to us regarding the situation. And that will happen with this mission, nobody wants to leave and watch it on TV. With few exceptions, everybody had to fight and scratch for a berth on the Jean Charcot; nobody is voluntarily giving one up, come hell or high water (which might fairly well describe your average hurricane).

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the break does allow us to get some pretty seriously needed work done. The down time gives us a chance to deal with some generator/power issues that cropped up late in the first leg; we can tune in our sat comms which won’t be a bad thing at all. Andy Sherrell, who is crunching data, can get some ducks in a row. By and large the expedition will be improved by the time out. When gather together this time we’ll know our gear is burned in, the teams know the drill on deployments and recoveries, everybody knows where to step to avoid getting caught in the bight and we’re now a group of colleagues who have effectively interacted with each other. I hazard a not-so-amazing prediction that when everybody comes together in a few more days that it will be like long lost friends reuniting. There will be lots of hugs and happiness and everybody will be energized to go get it done. Rested and coming back onto a ship where their gear is already stowed, equipment already rigged for sea and ready to roll. The transit out will probably the worst part, they’ll all hit the dock running and then have to settle in for a 36 hour transit, best guess is that by the time we get there everyone will be chomping at the bit to perform.

A lot of folks have gone home for a few days. Not many people working this job can afford to remain idle for a day or two, much less a week. Most of the AUV operations team went back to Woods Hole; they are very busy guys who have a lot of irons in the fire all around the oceanography community. I’ve stayed behind to keep an eye on the gear and run down anything they might need feet on the ground to handle. I am pretty comfortable anywhere with a laptop and my Blackberry so I can handle my duties relatively easily as long as I have an internet connection. Andy stayed behind a couple days to keep working data but he’s got a few commitments he can deal with so he’ll go home tomorrow morning, early. One of the Phoenix guys who already works a grueling schedule will fly home for a couple days to bounce his kids on his knee. He’s got a crack team lined out, a testament to their capabilities that he can head out for a brief visit with his loved ones. And Billy’s team is pretty much all still here. Those guys are running some cutting edge technology that seems like its getting invented as they go along. Mad scientists on wheels, those cats, it’s doctoral level tech tweaking.

St John's lit up Thursday night with a beautiful sunset offset by the lights from workboats and a cruise ship.

So here we are, in St John’s Newfoundland, waiting for the storm, kinda keeping fingers crossed it dissipates or turns course so folks don’t have to come back up here and fix stuff. The decision to hit the road was the right one no matter how you cut it, you can’t second guess a storm that might come on and whip up 40 foot waves. Tough to do much other than survive in seas of that nature, definitely not gonna get any work done if you have to tie yourself into your chair and then bolt that to the floor so you can hunt and peck through the bungie straps keeping your computer from turning into a projectile. I was in the Bering Sea once on a 330 foot ship taking 30 foot seas and watched a microwave oven fly across the room; it was like the thing hopped off the counter and took a ballistic trip 20 feet across the galley. We all sat stunned for a second, trying to decide if we should laugh or take cover. We all got up, picked up our coffee and wet napkins and then headed to check out the rigging on all the appliances that had not yet learned to fly (sailors trick, if you’re in big seas and you want to put a cup of coffee on a smooth surface and not have to watch it slide off the table, take a napkin and set it under your cup then dribble some liquid onto it as you set the cup down, sticks it there nicely). Running from weather is always the smart thing to do if you can afford it and when making that decision it’s always best to remember a maxim of work on the water: Greed Kills.

Soon enough I will be hanging with just a few new friends, all of my longer acquaintances having gone home to attend their career needs or families. When I’m not on my computer in my hotel room or puttering on board with the gear or analysis computers I am hoping to do a little more prowling around the area, get a look at some of the countryside. As always I will have my camera and will try and learn a little bit of something new to share in my posts. Right now its midnight and Andy is still in front of his computer while I keep him company and do a bit of writing in the quiet of a ship whose crew is enjoying a little liberty. I’m gonna check in with him and see about shutting it down so he can get a couple hours of sleep before his 6 AM flight. I think an 18 hour shift from him is a fair enough piece of work for one day.

Ah yes, one last thing, Kat, the young lady who acted as wedding planner for the nuptials held on board the other day, has agreed to write up the story of Maryann and Evan, our bride and groom (no relation to Mary Ann the AUV :-). Hopefully I can get that out to you in a day or two. It should be worth the wait. Cheers!

The entrance to St. John's, Newfoundland, by sea

The lighthouse at St. Johns, Newfoundland, one of the oldest in North America

Once the gear was on board the night of the 28^th we bugged out in advance of Danielle but I hazard if you weren’t on deck you’d have hardly noticed as far as the ride goes.  The first thing you realized was the ship had evened out, not bopping around as much as it does when it’s station keeping for operations.  Pretty big difference between maintaining a heading underway, a repetitious rise and fall as you travel the waves at 10 knots, versus occasionally wallowing in the slop when holding position or drifting during Ops.

When the ROV is on the wreck the ship is constantly using its dynamic positioning (DP) capabilities to stay in the exact spot the Phoenix guys tell it to be in.  Try doing that using only 2 screws, even with variable pitched props, double tough if not impossible.  You’re fighting ocean swell, winds (and resultant surface seas) then top it all off with current; it’s an easy bout to lose for a couple seconds and that’s all it takes sometimes for things to go wrong.  DP uses 2 (ea.) bow and stern mounted thrusters to try and bore a 5 meter hole in the ocean.  It’s quite cool.  And necessary; the ROV operators are holding position over a site that sticks up tens of meters from the ocean floor.  Titanic is a jagged, hundreds of tons anchor just waiting for anything unfortunate enough to get entangled in the rusticle covered wreckage.  And the ROV team is not just floating Remora over the site looking down; they’re running it up and down the sides, looking at the bottom surrounding the hull, lots of different moves as they ‘map’ it with Billy’s smoking hot 3D cameras.  It’s a thing of beauty when it’s going on, but, as you’ll likely hear me say again and again about many things, it ain’t easy.

ROV descent lights, viewed from above

Currents are a major variable.  They can run in different directions at different depths. When you consider that you’re working 4 kilometers down on the end of a tether and the only two things you can control are the position of the ship (mostly) and how you fly the vehicle using thrusters to fight against bottom current, it’s a solo dance at the end of a very long line amidst a whirlwind of variables.  It’s not at all the same but a decent enough analogy might be trying to dangle a washer on a string out of your fourth floor hotel room window and hovering it directly next to a soda can laying on the sidewalk below.  I am going to do a little more sniffing around Phoenix operations, pester the boys a bit and write some more about this.  It’s fascinating.

And sometimes a little scary.  Everybody loves you when you got it all going on but sometimes when you’re hanging your string in the wind over a tangle of steel  4 klicks down you can get a little hung up.  Then it gets real quiet in the labs.  Soon nonessential personnel start leaving.  Then it’s damn quiet everywhere.  The pilots are keeping their cool but if they ain’t sweating it internally, they ain’t human. At the end of the day, everybody has fall asleep alone in their head.  But the measure of a true professional is keeping your cool when it hits the fan; that’s how you get the job done.  Never let them see ya sweat because that shit is contagious.  You move the boat this way and that, drive the vehicle here and there, look around, understand what’s happening and why… and fly that bad boy out of trouble.  That’s the gig: high power underwater explorer space ship piloting with your contrail a potential anchor tail.  When the vehicle is free and the cheering stops it’s just the end of another day.  You wait until you’re on the beach in the bar with your boys before you let anyone know it had your pucker factor up and then it’s all laughs, good natured hard core ribbing and slaps on the back.  The Phoenix guys ROCK.

Once the girls were in their huts and Remora was on deck, we dogged it all down and headed to town in advance of the hurricane.  At the beginning of a transit home everybody hustles to make sure they’re gear is tied down so nothing rolls around and damages personnel or gear, then usually everyone heads for the rack.  You shed the tension of the job, start looking forward to town and for the next 36 hours you take care of processing and lining out your next moves.  The busiest people on board at this time are the analysts.  They’re caught up handling all the requests from their team mates so the planning can go forward.  We have multi beam data that needs to be processed.  Mosaics of sonar imaging in two frequencies that need to be made, smoothed, cleaned and tweaked.  14,000 photos, each representing a 7 meter square of bottom that need to be made into a map (if you printed each one onto a standard piece of paper and strung them together the resultant map would be roughly the size of 5 football fields)

Most of that is falling to Andy Sherrell.  He’s doing a helluva job.  When this is over ask Chris Davino, Dave Gallo, Jim Delgado, Billy Lange if they got all they asked of Andy and more, I know the answer already.  But it’s tough when they ALL want something within the next 1 hour.  Buggin’ out for the beach; he’d never admit it being happy about it but he wouldn’t deny the providence.  And that just ripples out to every one who’s waiting for that data.  They all get it, done right, in time to plan for a few days before ops most likely.  When we get back out to there this group is gonna be a well oiled machine.

Everything I discussed above has only to do with our data and how it will interact directly with the ROV operations.  How this will all fold into the overall product we are working towards making is hard to comprehend. If I understand it correctly, Billy’s HD 3d footage will be “draped” on top of the 3D representations that will eventually be produced by the data we are collecting.  It’s going to be a crazy conglomeration of datasets that should be something new, something never before seen.  It will really be a 3D, interactive, scientifically accurate visual representation of the wreck.  Add that one to the “Never Been Done Before” list of this expedition, right after concurrent AUV and ROV operations.

Wow, two posts that start at the beginning of the transit and I still don’t have us halfway to the beach yet.  Sorry, guess you’ll have to wait another day for it.  But do read on.  We left on the evening of the 28^th and arrived on the morning of the 30^th and the 36 hours in between were highly entertaining; like no other transit I’ve been on.  I am going to see if I can get one of the WHOI camera techs to guest blog and tell the story of the romance that swept up the ship on the way into town.

Next up: Wedding Day

Recovering an AUV after a mission can actually be riskier than launching one, but the operation itself is relatively simple. When the AUV team receives confirmation that the vehicle has reached the surface, the ship pulls up alongside the AUV, where a command is sent to release a float from the AUV’s nose. This float drifts away from the vehicle extending a recovery line from the float back to the vehicle. An air-powered cannon is then used to fire a grappling hook across the recovery line and the deck team uses those lines to attach the vehicle to the LARS. The LARS winches the AUV out of the water and into the LARS docking head. The LARS A-frame lowers the AUV back into its cradle on the back deck, where it’s locked down and washed with fresh water. It’s then rolled onto the removable rails back into it’s van, where the team will download the new data, change the batteries, and get it ready for the next mission.

Greg Packard and Kevin Manganini make one last check of the transducer box before loading it into the small boat for a recovery of the AUV.

Usually we need the ship to be under way for us to recover the AUV’s. The process goes a bit like this: We get notice from the vehicle on the bottom that she has finished her survey. We program the missions so we know generally how long they  last,we know how long it takes the vehicles to reach the bottom and then swim back up when they are done but there can be complicating factors to the total bottom time. For instance if a vehicle is encountering a lot of terrain its collision avoidance scenarios tend to slow it down. Or it might be coming up against a strong current which will affect traveling time. Finally, if the vehicle is dumping a lot of juice into sensors this can  chew through battery time quicker than anticipated. We monitor the vehicles at all times using a transducer on the surface that receives bursts of data on basic vehicle condition: orientation, range, depth, altitude, information on any faults that might be present. When they leave the bottom we know and are ready for them.

Generally they come up to the surface, call us on the Iridium net with their position and start flashing a strobe. We move the ship toward the vehicle and when we’re close we get it on wireless and take ‘manual’ control. We steer the ship on a parallel course, get it about 25-40 yards off to one side (starboard) and then give it a command to release a recovery float from its nose. If this happens with no issue we tell it to back down and the float moves away from the vehicles trailing a line that has been packed into its nose for this purpose. We shoot an air powered cannon that propels a grappling hook trailing a line over the recovery line suspended between the vehicle nose and the recovery float. We then hand haul that back in to the ship, attach a line from the Launch and Recovery System (LARS) onto the recovery line of the vehicle, pull the float off and move the ship forward so that the whole kit and caboodle streams behind us. Once that’s happening we just suck it back up into the LARS, on deck, and into her hut for data download, battery swap out and prep for the next mission.

Easy right? Hah! OK, sometimes not so much. Lots of moving parts that can go wrong in many different ways. And don’t ask me to explain past failures unless you’re sitting next to me in a bar and you’re buying (or you can go here and check out a previous blog of mine on the subject from our Search For Amelia website: http://log.searchforamelia.org/angler-fish. As well you can view video of a recovery here: http://wid.waittinstitute.org/recovering-mary-ann).

The ROV Remora, the vehicle responsible for capturing the 3D footage

On this particular day we had an ROV down on site taking HD 3D footage, the whole world watching live so we didn’t really want to go into the next room and say, “umm, hey guys? We know you’ve been pulling this together for years and now that you got it going on we’d really like to ask a little favor. Do you mind knocking off for a bit? Ya know, take a little break? What’s that? It takes 3 hours to get to the bottom and 2 more to get back up and after finally getting all your integrations burned in you’d really prefer to actually let it work? That the whole point of an ROV is that once you get it down you can leave it down and switch out pilots every couple hours?” We knew better than to even ask, most especially if we had other options. The Phoenix guys have a double tough job in front of them and no one’s idea of a good plan is to move backward.

Not a problem, the WHOI guys that run the AUV’s are Marines at heart: they improvise, overcome and adapt (semper fi to my buddies in the Corps). So it was that Mary Ann was recovered by one of the ship’s small boats, brought over and hooked into the LARs so that the Jean Charcot could stay on station using her dynamic positioning.

Prepping for small boat recovery of an AUV

I was very anxious to get a look at the high resolution sonar Mary Ann had brought home. The multi-beam data was really what the job needed so the ROV guys can have a 3D map of the wreck to avoid entanglement but I love sonar and I was stoked to see what was likely to be the most dramatic sonar record of my career. How many analysts get to look at Titanic the day the data was collected? Indeed, how many sonar analysts get to go to the Titanic in the first place? The sonar will be extremely useful as it will help us define the debris field, spot areas that might have something new to teach us and assist in answering some of the mysteries of Titanic.  And it’s pretty.

But the data would take a while to download and the vehicle was just coming aboard; I had plenty of time for a cup of coffee, a little morning routine action, my favorite of the day. So I got my black/one sugar, went into the imaging lab and slipped on a pair of Billy’s glasses and sat down in front of walls filled with live 3D video of the titanic. I quickly forgot my upcoming sonar data.

The video being generated is simply amazing. To a guy like me who loves this kind of thing words simply fail to carry the impact of just how incredible it was to sit there and enjoy my cuppa joe in front of screens that weren’t reporting the news but making it! It’s moments like that when life is almost unbearably sweet. How did I get here? A guy like me, flatland born, former Alaskan fish buyer, in the oceanography business for all of five years and now, out in the Atlantic, watching in person what millions of people of the world were following on their televisions at home? I tell ya what, that was one damn fine cup of coffee.

At one point we were sitting there, waiting for the ROV to set up for a pass over the bow when suddenly the Remora ran up and over the bow. It was like the shots the 3D films use to remind you you’re watching 3D, the ‘in your face’ splatter shot. Except this time it wasn’t some zombie grabbing at you or the phone falling off the cradle at you like in Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder”. All of the sudden the bow of the Titanic was THERE. And it was real. Happening now, 3,700 meters directly below me.

Billy’s gear is amazing; the water around the wreck is filled with little stuff floating around, either plankton or particulate matter. It’s kind of like snow although it really doesn’t seem to affect his images much. Every once in a while something larger would float right in front of the camera and more than once I involuntarily swished my hand in front of my face to wave it away. After a move like that you feel sort of silly but it’s a testament to just how striking and real that footage is. There may be people out there who think 3D is a gimmick but let me tell you, on work like this it has absolute scientific value. You can measure things in that kind of footage. No metering sticks, no laser scalers set project a couple parallel red dots set to a premeasured distance so you know how big something is. This video can actually be used to measure items. Think that’s easy? Take a look at an old video you have of your folks then tell me how tall one of them is.  To the centimeter. It may not sound like a lot but it’s huge, a massive scientific advantage.

That’s not the only one. I truly feel that one should not underestimate the value of just how compelling this footage is to the average person watching. Sometimes you need drama to move the  person who otherwise could care less about the ocean. Getting folks turned on about the oceans is a major reason many oceanographers do what they do.  They want people to understand the importance of that which covers 3/4th of Earth. Billy’s gear will definitely open some eyes. I won’t go too much into the Titanic footage, not now anyway. It makes its own thunder and it doesn’t need my puling voice added. I sat there mesmerized and before I knew it an hour had passed. I hazard a guess that this will be some of the most viewed footage ever created. It’s flat out crazy cool. Find out for yourself.

Given the media coverage on this one it was no surprise that all eyes were turned to the video screens. We are a TV generation; things become real to us once we see it on TV. We tend to get sucked in, a learned behavior. Heck, even I forgot that I had high res sonar imagery of Titanic sitting on the computer. The ROV guys had pretty effectively grabbed the spotlight, all the press turned to them and that’s cool; I said so myself above, that stuff is über sexy. But it didn’t take away the chill I felt when I got my buddy Andy to run the sonar data. He was on his way to lunch but I plead with him to show me a bit as I had to run out on deck to grab up Ginger soon. He relented and man alive, it is smoking hot data. I had to restrain myself from a shout. It’s as dramatic as any sonar data you will ever see. Right now it’s pushing 10PM and ROV ops have ceased and Billy the Phoenix camera tech are standing behind me looking at our side scan data.

“Wow!” “Holy cow!” “That’s sidescan data?” “What frequency and range?” “How high are you flying.” “Look at that.” “Will you show him the stern, please?” “Are those the boilers? Oh man that is amazing!” These are the guys who made the 3D happen and I hope I’m right when I say that they are blown away. It’s off the hook. We also got killer multi-beam data and thousands of photos that are still downloading.
It’s been a banner day at sea.

I have said to anyone who will listen all day long that I don’t care how long you have or will spend at sea, this has got to be one the best days any expedition ever experienced. In the last 24 hours we have created a high resolution side scan site map and collected multi beam data that will be used to create a 3D map and took some 16,000 photos of the site that will be used in another mosaic. That’s just the AUVs; the ROV team put in 24 hours of 3D filming all over the site, turning out some incredible footage. I mentioned once before that I have only worked searches and in expressing the emotion above others have pointed out to me that the difference is the fact that this is a known site. Still though, it was one helluva day on site and we accomplished a lot, not the least of which is that we had 2 AUVs in the water and continued our operations while a work class ROV was on site 4 klicks below us.  That’s hot ops. Heck, if a hurricane were to push us off the site tomorrow we would all still count this among the best days we ever spend at sea.

The view headed into Quidi Vidi Harbor, St. Johns, Newfoundland

Boulder Rock, St. Johns, Newfoundland

Oh yeah, did I mention? A hurricane is going to push us off site tomorrow!

Yep, hurricane Danielle is coming. So it’s back to St Johns to hole up until the storm passes. It’s almost a good thing, we all have so much data to crunch we could use the time. It will take literally days of post processing to get this data ready. The multi-beam data is particularly important. But everybody has their hopes; people want to see this segment or that, look at pictures, check out an area of side scan data. Andy Sherrell, the guy doing our analysis and processing, is sitting on week’s worth of work and everybody wants something now. He’s probably a bit tired of folks trying to ease his mind about it but it’s a measure of the camaraderie out here that those offers of assistance and empathy toward his position atop the mountain of data are expressed  to him.  No worries,he’s all over it.

Alrighty kids, I’m out. I’ll drop something tomorrow but we’re looking at a little hiatus.

Only minutes later we found that she had an even less power remaining than originally thought and had aborted her mission due to a preprogrammed safety protocol that commanded her to do so. This ensured that she would have enough power when she reached the surface to communicate with us, run her strobes and make a phone call over the Iridium network to tell us where she was should we fail to contact her (that’s right, they phone home). Upon hearing that she was en route back to the surface we had to leave the lab and the developing data to get ready to pick her up.

Imaging lab aboard the Jean Charcot.

Expedition leaders Chris Davino (left) and Dave Gallo discuss mission progress.

It was an hour or so later that we gathered back in the lab to look at data. As both vehicles were on the surface and had good data we really had to wake the mission leadership up and wait for them to join us before we ran through the sonar record. We were just a bit jumpy to get a peek at the initial results obtained after months of planning, weeks of equipping and days of sailing and operations. We all seriously wanted to see the first site survey to fully map the entire region around and including the wreck of the Titanic.

We waited, not so patiently, as the group gathered. Talked of previous careers. Discussed the J Geils music playing. Turned off the J Geils music playing. Turned on a little Mozart (I know, surprising what a classy bunch we are). Soon enough all were present and the moment we’d all been waiting for had arrived. Andy rolled the data. It was nice and clean, no noise or other issues. A discussion about the color scheme being used on the screens ensued regarding whether the shadows were black or white. A wager was placed. A Diet Coke was lost.  Don’t worry Dave Gallo of WHOI, I won’t let anybody know that you owe Andy Sherrell of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute a Diet Coke.

Oops

The only guy in the room at the time who had been here before was Bill Lange, the underwater imaging genius from Woods Hole who designed the HD and 3D cameras to be used on the ROVs during the photographic inspection dives. The sonar map maps we are creating will serve to guide his missions. As Bill was the legacy he played the part of guide as we all watched some fairly dramatic sonar imagery of the ocean floor scroll down the screens.

Again, results from sonar are not pictures: it is a visual representation based on the reflectivity of a target and the strength of the return of the sonic energy bounced from it back to the sonar transducer. Those images require interpretation. What looks like a ridgeline may well be nothing more than a portion of the bottom that has all the sand scoured off it by the current exposing the rock beneath; it may not necessarily rise off the bottom at all. That is why shadows contain so much useful information; you can measure the length of shadows to help you understand how high something rises. The contours of the shadow will also define the shape of the object much like the shadow from a flashlight would.

While we watched the initial lanes of the data scroll Billy would comment on this or that as we tried to orient ourselves to the wreck. As we had not seen any of the previously mapped and photographed structures in the sonar record yet it was still guesswork as to where we were. Then the moment we had been waiting for: what appeared to be the bow of the ship appeared on the screens and that put everything else into perspective, gave us our orientation. That’s when I finally had to crash after 22 hours on the job.

The Morning After
This morning I found we got exactly what we had hoped for from the missions and those images have gone out around the world. I am sure many people are wondering what the big deal is, it’s a tad anticlimactic compared to photography and the long range sonar stuff does no justice to the sense of scale of this site. It needs to be pointed out, the site has never been fully mapped and from what I understand there are still many discoveries to be made. Not all of the ship has been found and the extent of the debris field has never been fully understood. Our work yesterday helped us plan the work the AUVs and Remora will accomplish tomorrow, and that should be an order of magnitude more dramatic.

Currently the girls are down on the site running a higher frequency, and thus higher resolution, sonar. The range scales are going to be a lot shorter, they won’t cover as much ground in as much time but we now know exactly where we want to further develop our understanding and that’s where they’re headed. Aside from sonars Ginger is carrying a camera and Mary Ann the multi-beam. This downward looking sonar hits the area with many more pings per second and although the swath is much narrower we will be able to “see” the site in 3 dimensions once it’s processed. The multi beam data combined with the higher resolution sonar and the mosaic we will generate when all the photos come aboard will give the ROV team a new resource to explore the site, a complete map of the area with exceptionally accurate navigational info. That highly enhanced navigational data will give the ROV pilots a new capability and understanding of the debris field that did not exist before we arrived. It will be a development that will be as stirring and important as all of the work that has gone on previously.

I’d like to say a word about my team out here. The Waitt Institute owns and tasks the AUVs but we collaborate with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, specifically the OSL lab, to operate and maintain them. The men in this group are, aside from being the bunch that developed this technology, exceptionally skilled engineers who put in extremely long and difficult hours. We also work with another electrical engineer from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, a good friend of mine named Andy Sherrell. He does our sonar analysis and this is our 7th voyage together. On this trip I have seen most of these guys work 20 hour days since our arrival in Newfoundland and they will continue to do so until we pull into port. It’s grueling and they deserve recognition for their effort. Without them the AUVs could not perform as magnificently as they do. In the coming days I will likely profile some of them, I hope you enjoy meeting them as much as I enjoy working with them.

Our Neighbors at Sea
One last personal observation. The pilot whales were back today in force, had to be at least 20 or 30 of them on the surface very near the starboard rail of the ship late this afternoon. It looks like they are feeding on something near the surface, today it looked like a few of them tried to stay almost on top of the water. Their languid glide through the water, their proximity to the others, almost ‘leaning’ on each other as they feed, is compelling. I know whales are social animals with huge ranges but it feels like they want to hang around with us (although I’m certain there is an upwelling or something of the like nearby that has them in the area feeding). There is an elegance and economy of movement to them that I find oddly reassuring and serene. I hope you all have the opportunity to see them in their native habitat someday. They bring to my mind buffalo, a species that once permeated the biosphere they inhabited, placid in the huge numbers that once ranged across our continent. Now you almost have to go to a zoo to see one. I hope for all of our sakes that this is not the resultant case with whales. I have no understanding or even comprehension of those who would hunt or enclose these graceful, highly social and peaceful mammals. A pox on those who prey upon the cephalopods.

The first launch took place with little fanfare at 4 AM local and Mary Ann was sent down to run a survey from east to west using her low frequency side scan sonar as well as her Delta T multi-beam. At roughly 8 AM this morning Ginger was launched to do an opposing survey, she will work north/south with the same frequency side scan sonar. When these two maps are laid over each other they will fill in each others shadows for a complete map of the site. We should be looking at that sometime tomorrow and to say everyone is looking forward to seeing them is a massive understatement. In the past I have worked only searches for items undiscovered as opposed to a survey; on searches when we thought we had a target of interest, we would often have to wait days or even weeks for another look. This time we are on survey at a known site. There is little doubt that the girls will come back with dramatic results and anticipation is rising as we await the girls’ return.

After Ginger was launched, a couple AUV techs were up in the Operations Lab showing some of the Phoenix technicians how surveys are programmed; during that instructional period an error was discovered in Gingers programming. This was a fortunate happenstance since Ginger was not yet halfway down to the wreck site and we were able to send her an acoustic command to drop her descent weight as well as her ascent weight and return to the surface immediatley. Instead of losing an operational day we were able to repair the programming error, reload the weights and recovery line and have her back in the water in something just over an hour. Mistakes happen but it’s seldom you have the opportunity to correct them so quickly, yet another valuable feature of the AUVs.

Right now, as I prepare to sign off for a bit and go grab a bite to eat, both vehicles are at depth working along with no negative indications. I am going to give some thought about what to talk about next (we don’t anticipate Mary Ann’s return until 1 AM, 14 hours from now).

An AUV floating at the surface. Photo Credit: Ian Kellett

3PM
How about we learn some stuff about AUV’s aka Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. One of the key aspects to their abilities is in the first word, autonomous, which means they are independent of any surface controlling tethers. They are free swimming, preprogrammed automatons that can perform a number of exceptionally important tasks when undertaking underwater search operations. But before we get to what they can do lets discuss a bit more about what they are.

The Waitt Institute AUV, Mary Ann, awaits testing on deck before the Florida Straits expedition embarks. Photo Credit: Michael Dessner

The girls (as we affectionately refer to them; specifically Mary Ann and Ginger) are 13 foot, 2000 pound torpedo looking devices. They are comprised primarily of titanium and syntactic foam (which is a medium of molded glass microspheres that provide buoyancy). Inside the syntactic hull, mounted to the titanium strongback frame, are all the housings for the instrumentation and the sensors which you will see peaking through the yellow syntactic at various intervals. The bottles and cans that hold the electrical junctions and instrumentation are either pressure resistant due to the extreme nature of their construction from thick walled titanium or are oil filled which allows them to compensate for the extreme pressures to which they are subjected. The vehicles are rated to what is commonly accepted as full ocean depth, 6000 meters, although the abysses of the planet are much, much deeper. The pressures that the vehicles must survive to operate at this depth are simply astronomical. At full depth a square inch would have 8,400 lbs of pressure on it. A square foot would then have one million two hundred nine thousand six hundred pounds of force exerted on it. The rough area of the vehicle in total is about 90 feet. That means the entire vehicle, when at full depth, is under one hundred eight million eight hundred sixty thousand pounds (108,860,000 lbs), or, if ya wanna round it off, just call it an even 54,000 tons. When I tell people these things are bullet proof I ain’t lying. On this job we’re only working at about 3,700 meters, so the vehicles are only suffering 33,000 tons of force. A walk in the park to the girls.

What’s that you say? “Alright, they’re damn tough but what else can they do? After all, as any cook worth his salt will tell you, you’re only as good as your last meal.”. Well listen up my friend and listen well. About the only things these things can’t do at full ocean depth is carry a tune or pick something up.

The primary sensor on the AUVs is side scan sonar but ours can carry a suite of additional equipment as well. I won’t go much into sonar here (detailed information about that can be found in my logs from the Search for Amelia (http://log.searchforamelia.org) but in essence they are like sonic flashlights shined out to either side of the vehicle, effective out to 600 meters in each direction. You “see” what the flashlight in the metaphor would light up and the shadows created give you a lot of information, help define the shape of the “lit” item. Depending on the reflectivity of the surface you can also tell a lot about its nature (for instance sponges are less reflective, steel much more so).

Mounted permanently on the bottom of the girls are Doppler Velocity Loggers which can be set to act as Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (used to measure water currents). This sensor looks a bit like a hat with 4 red circles on it and acts as a bottom sensor. When the vehicles get to depth this ‘sees’ the bottom and then helps the vehicle maintain altitude. It also works with the system’s computers and a pencil beam sonar mounted on the nose that looks forward and slightly downward, effectively providing the system collision avoidance capabilities. The AUV is slightly buoyant after it releases its descent weight and if these sensors tell its brain that it’s about to run into something it tries to turn up and avoid it; if that doesn’t work it stops the prop from turning and floats upwards until the obstacle is no longer detected, then it purrs merrily along doing its thing. This is invaluable in a search like the Air France flight 447 effort which is taking place above a submerged mountain range. A towed system is very difficult to handle on that type of search (deep with rugged terrain) because you are often trailing equipment well behind and far below your support vessel and if you are constantly coming too far off the bottom you are not making good data. The girls can come to a near full stop as they float upwards so when they start moving again they haven’t missed so much. It is a signature capability of the REMUS AUV’s.

The Waitt Institute also owns a multi-beam unit that can be mounted on the girls; this is like a downward looking sonar that can be used to produce a 3 dimensional representation of what the vehicles ‘see’ below them. One reason we use sonars instead of multi beam is that the swath, or area covered, is so much smaller when using the multi beam. The vehicles have what we refer to as an “Eco Puck” which acts as a CTD (conductivity, salinity and depth) sensor, the data from which it uses in its navigations. This can be rigged with a sub bottom profiler which gives readings that inform the user of the make up of the bottom (sand, gravel, coral, etc). I really do not know much about this sensor but we plan to use it out here so more on that one later as I learn.

Finally the vehicle carries a camera. Now that may not seem like much but this, too, is a signature sensor of the Waitt Institute AUVs. Imagine with me for a moment…. you are looking for something on the ocean bottom and you are towing a side scan sonar (as the Institute did working in conjunction with Naticos in ’06 looking for Amelia Earhart’s plane). You are sitting in front of a screen watching data drop down about an inch every 15 minutes and shazam, you get a hot target. Naturally you want to get another look. If you are towing at ocean depth a turn alone may take a couple hours and you may not have the ability to switch to a higher frequency for better resolution. But we’ll say you do, so you make a two hour turn and switch freq.s and go past it again. If you are lucky enough to trail your tether, which is towing your sonar 4 miles below you and four miles behind you, directly over your target (and trust me, that ain’t easy) you still are going to be looking at a sonar image and that is nothing like a picture. It is a representation based on sonic energy and it needs interpreting. Moving on, your target still looks hot and you decide you want to take a real look at it. So you haul in your sonar which takes hours, rig your AUV, more hours, send it down and assuming you don’t have any ground fault issues and get directly onto your target (ASS U ME, remember) when you find it you will know. It could take days if everything works, weeks if not, months to years if you don’t have an ROV that can handle the job and have to go back to port, raise money and get back out there; all based on a interpreted image. Good luck with that pitch.

Now, cut to the girls in the same scenario. One of them was on a 24 hour mission; after recovery, data download and an hour or two of a quick initial look at the data the sonar analyst sees something he likes as a target and wants another look. On her next run she is programmed to re-acquire target for assessment and 4 hours after she came to the surface she is headed back to the bottom. She heads into the next box up the line and when she gets close to the target area she breaks off to head to the target and remember, our navs are flawless as they rely both on Deep Ocean Transponders and a Kearfott Inertial Navigation Unit in the AUV. It’s the kind of technology the military uses to put missiles into basket ball hoops hundreds of miles from launch. We don’t miss. When she gets to the target zone she drops in altitude, switches to high frequency, high resolution sonar and begins clicking away with her camera. 24 hours after launch you know. Know whether or not you have found your target. Don’t take my word for it; ask anyone in the industry, it’s a huge capability. To be able to ground truth within a day of detection at full ocean depth? It’s revolutionary to the world of underwater survey, an unparalleled, cutting edge technology that I truly believe will put towed systems out of business in the next 20 years. Don’t get me wrong, I mean no offense to my brethren in the field who use towed systems. Those systems work and they work well but I believe the improvement in capabilities represented by AUVs is an exponential leap in technology and is the way of the future.

Mary Ann, the 6000-meter AUV. Photo Credit: Brian Cousin

Whew. I’m all wrung out. Talking about the girls gets me going, they’re just so darn cool. Right now both girls are working away, recovery tonight, first sonar images of Titanic will be in front of me in mere hours (I have trouble believing I just said that. Mrs. Dessner’s little boy is working on TITANIC! Man I love my job and can’t say enough about the man who gave it to me although what Ted Waitt has done for me is nothing in comparison to what he’s done for the rest of the world through his philanthropy. A truly amazing man doing important and fantastic things in many different fields. Check it out: http://waittfoundation.org )

It seems like the stars have aligned for us, or at least the low and high pressure systems. For the first time since my arrival in Newfoundland I am seeing some serious blue sky above us. We are seeing a slightly elevated sea state from most of the transit but that’s not an issue, its well within our operating envelope and I will tradeoff a bit of motion for the happy rays of the sun any day.

In an hour or so we will arrive and after a memorial ceremony we will begin operations. Step one: deploy and survey in the AUV system Deep Ocean Transponders (DOTs). Then we will put one of the girls in. We are going to be using our longer range sonars set at a slightly closer range than usual, to get technical we going to use our 120 kHz sonars set at a 400M range scale and run them at a 40M altitude. The second vehicle will go in some time later and run the same basic mission but from a different direction, this will fill in any ‘holidays’ in our data. I’d love to jabber on some more but my guys are working their heinies off and I really should join them.

9:00 PM
On a job in the Caribbean a man I admire on many levels, Dr. Donald Keith, was making conversation on the back deck while we towed a side scan sonar (an activity that I’ve heard on many occasions compared to watching paint dry). Don asked a rhetorical question meant to stimulate discussion, which I thought was pretty cool in and of itself as he helped us kill a couple hours that way. Don’s an awesome guy, works with Ships of Discovery and in the Turks and Caicos islands, most recently on the wreck Trouvadore. The question he asked was, “what is it that money cannot buy?” A spirited debate that often turned humorous followed but one person made an answer that I never forgot. He said, “No matter how much money you have you can’t buy good weather”. That’s a pretty clear hint on how this entry is going to end.

But let’s go back to those hours of yore when all were happy and attitudes were at their apex, that time when we went operational just 12 hours ago. The sun was shining, the gear was ready, all we had to do was start doing our thing, and that’s exactly what we did.

First, though, we had some serious business to attend to. As everyone reading this knows, the sinking of the Titanic was a dramatic human tragedy in which over 1500 lives were lost. It was only fitting that as we entered the waters over Titanic we pause for moment to remember and honor those souls who made the ultimate journey on that fateful night almost a hundred year ago. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of an expedition like this, the cutting edge equipment run by the best and brightest in their fields, but everyone aboard this ship knows that this is more than just an archeological site, it is first and foremost the final resting place of 815 passengers and 688 crew who perished in the dark and cold. Thus when we arrived those of us available went to the bow of the ship and reflected upon those sobering thoughts and placed flowers into the ocean commemorating the loss. It was a brief yet sincere and heartfelt ceremony.

Tending a transducer

Ground Guide Andy and Deck Boss Mark Dennet

Afterwards the AUV team prepped our Deep Ocean Transponders (DOT) on the back deck. The DOTs are used to set a baseline that the AUVs check their progress against and are key to the successful re-navigation back to a target of interest. They are acoustic place markers that we anchor to the bottom that then communicate their position to the vehicles and help them navigate. When we deploy them we first drift flotation balls in the water, then a section of line, then the DOT itself, another length of line and an anchor. They fall to the ocean floor (it takes about an hour for them to fall the 3,700 meters to the bottom) and then we triangulate their positions by moving the ship to a few different locations and then interrogating the DOTs with a transducer on the surface. That interaction gives us range to the DOTs, we already know how deep they are and after doing this a few times we know exactly where they are. That is programmed into the AUV missions so that when Mary Ann and Ginger check their positions with the DOTs they can ‘calculate’ their exact location. The DOTs work in concert with the Inertial Navigation Units aboard the AUVS and this combination makes their navs powerfully accurate.

So we splashed the DOTs, did some running around triangulating them and as the day progressed so did the wind also rise. By the time we were ready to start getting the vehicles ready for the water whispers were going around the ship that the weather might be going to come up even more. As the sun edged toward the horizon the waves started to edge up onto the deck. A meeting was held and it was decided that we would indeed wait until midnight to check the weather again and reassess. Not a big deal, I have never been to sea when weather did not affect operations so it’s really par for the course, but it does kind of take the wind out of your sails a bit. I do think, however that the weather situation will subside enough that we will be able to launch the vehicles at first light (knock wood).

During the DOT survey some of the locals came out to observe

One other happy note, we were visited on a couple occasions today as we surveyed DOTS by a curious pod of pilot whales. I could go on for pages about how cool I think whales are and how I feel humanity will be judged by how it treats these majestic mammals of the oceans but its getting late and I need to go to bed if I am going to be up in time to launch at first light, so I’ll simply throw a pic or two of our companions in the waters over Titanic. They really say enough.

Entries:

August 30 - “Mother Nature holds sway over Titanic expedition”

August 28 - “Viewing the Titanic wreckage in high-def 3-D”

August 27 - “First new images of Titanic debris field emerge”

August 26 - “Kerry Sanders Q&A on the Titanic expedition”

August 24 - “Underwater equipment launched in Titanic Search“

Links:

NBC News WorldBlog

The Titanic rests in dock before setting off on its maiden journey on April 10, 1912 ~ Photograph by: RMS Titanic Inc., Photo Handout

On September 1, 1985, Titanic was discovered resting on the ocean floor. Twenty-five years after her discovery, RMS Titanic, Inc., in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Waitt Institute, will embark on what is arguably the most technologically advanced scientific expedition to Titanic ever organized. RMS Titanic is bringing together a team of leading experts in various oceanographic, scientific and nautical archaeological fields. Using the latest advances in technology, the expedition team will conduct a full survey of the wreck site capturing Titanic in 2D and 3D video, creating a first ever archeological site map.

Waitt Institute Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), one of the most important pieces of equipment to be used in Expedition Titanic. Photo Credit: Ian Kellett

Provided by the Waitt Institute, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) will enable the expedition team to create the first ever comprehensive and multi-dimensional map of the Titanic wreck site. The AUVs, with their suite of onboard sensors will provide new and unique views of the famous ship and reveal secrets about her past, present, and future. AUVs are one of the most important pieces of equipment to be used in Expedition Titanic. The most famous sections of Titanic, the bow and stern, will be documented in 3D using Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) that acquire digital data bringing portions of the Titanic to life.  There is still much to be discovered and recorded on and below the seafloor.

Join the team of leading archaeologists, oceanographers and scientists as they do what no one has ever attempted before: to virtually raise Titanic, preserving the legacy of the Ship for all time.

During their 1996 Expedition, RMS Titanic, Inc. captured this stunning image of the bow illuminated with the help of four Edison light towers.

Official Press Release:

Atlanta, GA, July 27, 2010 –RMS Titanic, Inc. (the Salvor-In-Possession of RMS Titanic and its wreck site) in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Waitt Institute will conduct a ground- breaking expedition to Titanic 25 years after its discovery, to do what no one has ever attempted before:  take innovative measures to virtually raise Titanic, preserving the legacy of the Ship for all time. NBC News and NBC’s Peacock Productions will be the exclusive broadcast partner.

In what is arguably the most technologically advanced scientific expedition to Titanic ever organized, RMS Titanic, Inc. has brought together a team of leading archaeologists, oceanographers and scientists including The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, The National Oceanic Atmospheric and Administration’s National Marine Sanctuaries Program, and The National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center to execute this historic “mission of firsts.”

Launching from St. John’s, Newfoundland on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, this 20-plus day expedition will employ revolutionary acoustic imaging, sonar technologies and high resolution optical, video and 3-D imaging to provide the first comprehensive view of the entire wreck site with unprecedented accuracy and clarity. Through this suite of sophisticated robots, sonars and cameras, leading experts will chart the boundaries of the wreck site, map the physical position of the Ship and its artifacts on the ocean floor, and create a blueprint that will inform the wreck site’s ongoing maintenance. Together, this data will work to paint a complete picture of Titanic that only a few have been able to witness first-hand.

[caption id=”" align=”alignright” width=”223″ caption=”The anchors on Titanic appear to almost be touching the ocean floor, due