Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has herald that its intercrossed ROV , the Nereus , was lost over the weekend and is irrecoverable , having sunk to the bottom of the 10,000 meter Kermadec Trench .
The 14 foot - long , 3 - ton Nereus , which was capable of diving both with and without an optical tether , only recently join the WHOI ’s robotic fleet in 2009 and at one time held the world phonograph record for rich dive by an ROV — a distance of 10,902 meters in the Marianas Trench .
As Ken Kostel from the WHOI , explained in a press handout :
Our dive last Nox was the deepest one planned of the entire cruise—10,000 meters . Six mi . Everything was go hunky-dory . Two sets of pushcores were in the sample hoop , and we ’d recorded intimately two hour of television transects , plus more of individual brute that flourish in the hadal environs at the bottom of the Kermadec Trench . We ’d just fill in call for a sea Cucumis sativus for the respirometer and were have Nereus ready to steer to the submerged elevator . Then the tv camera feeds abruptly went dark , and we recede communicating with the vehicle .
We were n’t particularly worried — it had materialize before and the vehicle interior designer had project for something like this . Whenever Nereus lost contact with the control surface , it was programmed to look 30 minutes so that the ship could be moved a good distance out before Nereus dropped its ascent weight . So we moved and waited . But this clock time the acoustic communicating modem on the fomite , which is used to set the fomite ’s position from the ship , also lead silent .
This still was n’t a troublesome problem . We knew its last position on the seafloor , roughly how fast it would turn out , and the nature of the flow beneath the surface . So we have a go at it close to when and where it would appear . But it did n’t . Groups of us stood as high on the ship ’s catwalks scanning the ocean as blood of squalls rolled through and blur the horizon . Hints of vexation began to appear as time passed , but again , it was n’t particularly troublesome because there were several more back - up sack mode built into the vehicle . The last was a “ dead - man ” electric release hold the weights that was set up to eat away roughly 24 hour after Nereus went in the body of water .
We were nearing the time window associate with the first of those backup liberation when one of the ship ’s crew blot some blanched physical object in the body of water . Then more . The rescue boat went in and three gang members began scouring the control surface with nets as more and more white dots appeared . By then we knew . Nereus was gone .
That miserable , poor ocean cucumber . This is a blow to the WHOI ’s research try , certainly , but it could have been much worse . They could have drop off the$42 million Alvin .
Science
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