Robotic Nereus submarine aims to explore the depths of Challenger Deep
By Donald Melanson 
posted May 6th 2009 4:04PM
posted May 6th 2009 4:04PM
Robotic submarines have already achieved some pretty impressive feats of submersion, but this new Nereus sub developed by the folks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution looks set to out-do those in a fairly big way, with it now on track to dive down into all 11,000 meters of the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean. What's more, while the sub can be operated remotely, it also has a fully autonomous mode, which'll let it make use of the on-board chemical sensors, sonar, and digital photography to seek out areas of interest and map out "vast swathes of the seafloor" before returning to the ship automatically. As you might have guessed, all of that comes at a fairly hefty price tag -- about $5 million -- and it seems like may only be the first of a flood of robotic submarines to come, with British, French, Russian and Japanese teams said to be watching the Nereus' progress "with interest." It doesn't look like they'll have to wait all that long for the big show, however, as the sub is apparently now starting to undergo a series of progressively difficult test dives in advance of the main event planned for late May or early June.
This has a nice cool factor, but what actual benefits are provided by exploring the Challenger Deep?
not being a scientist, i may be totally off, but my guess would be the benefit is knowledge.
Yes, but how does that knowledge benefit us? That's what I was trying to find out.
Well how does it not benefit us? It can lead to many interesting things.
The obvious one is material research. Simply by building something capable of descending to such crushing depths, engineers learn quite at lot.
Then there's the new discovery aspect: lifeforms that can survive in situations that would literally crush/freeze/boil/dissolve most lifeforms. The bottom of the seas are where we find the best analogues to alien life.
No offense, but kind of question is that? If we knew exactly what was down there, then we wouldn't be going down there like this, now would we? The point is, its still largely unknown, so we are exploring the unknown. That will probably give us many more specific reasons to go down there. For now, it's on our planet, and its still an unexplored part of that planet.
Isn't that exciting enough that we still have such places to explore?
Not to be a dick or anything, but I'm pretty sure there were people quite like you who asked the same questions of Columbus in King Ferdinand's court. Sometimes it's worth looking into places you have never seen before, it pays off every now and then.
Apparently people have taken my question as my being hostile towards this endeavor, I'm not. I'm truely wondering what kind of benefits will come out of this.
Obviously, we have to make sure Megatron is still down there.
It's clearly meant to explore the underwater UFO bases...
We learn more about the ocean which we only know very little about, the Mariana trench is a subduction zone which means one tectonic plate moves under another tectonic plate. So just that is enough of a reason to go down there. Not to mention all the potential discovery for life. Then you have to consider what we did before down there and you realize we can't know that much about anything down there with the little amount of time we've spent.
We've only been down there once, the first time was the first and only manned trip down there. They spent 20 minutes on the surface, then they went home. The second time was a ROV, which needs cables and well I don't need to remind you about the pressure. So they were very limited in what they could do. Now you have Nereus, which will be able to explore like never before.
Will those egg sacks hatch tiny subs?
They wanted it to resemble a fish so much they gave it roe. Watch out for Russian caviar fishermen!
Damn I was going to go with the giant octopus joke... :(
Scientists used to put styrofoam cups in a bag and send it down to the bottom. The pressure at the bottom would cause the cups to shrink down to the size of a thimble. Then someone decided, why not try one of those strofoam heads instead? You know the ones that people usually keep wigs on. My guess is that is a bag of shrunken styrofoam heads.
An example of a before and after can be found here:
http://www.mbari.org/expeditions/Pulse53/Logbook/sept18.htm
We won't know until we look. We have explored outer space more then we have have explored our own ocean. There is always the chance new life/organisms will be found which possibly leads to new chemical compounds which might mean new cures diseases.
Then again man kind will finds something new and destroy it or us.
about 5 million, thats cheap, considering what we spend for going into space. We need to spend more discovering the other 2/3 of the world. Only 3% of the ocean floor has been explored but we will spend billions just trying to get to outer Space????
Well considering we have explored 1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 of the outer space, then the price ratio is worth it... (for the US at least)
NASA only takes up about six percent of the budget, six percent. The department of education gets more money than NASA for example. So please know what your talking about before you rant against NASA just because you can. Space exploration, and the exploration of the ocean aren't at odds with each other. They're both worth while.
Down to the depths of the ocean floor.
Down to the depths that we never explore.
Down to the depths some seek to be un-poor.
Down to the depths all we’ll find is Satan’s door!
Watch what you bring back up fells. Just Sayin...
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Currently listening to: Madvillainy (MF Doom)
Track #: 14 “Figaro”
“Everything that glitters ain't fish scale. Lemme think, don't let a feint get Ishmael”
"Tasty, but not entirely satisfying. Please send a manned sub next time," commented Cthulhu.
"Alistair Hennessey: How are things going with your - what are you calling it? Leopard fish?
Steve Zissou: Jaguar shark.
Alistair Hennessey: Jaguar shark! So tell me - does it really exist?
Steve Zissou: [hesitant] You know, Allie, I don't want to give away the ending. "
$5 Million is nothing. Think of what they put into Space exploration.
The balls are ceramic flotation spheres. The main housings are also ceramic with Ti endcaps. I have to admit I was feeling a little skeptic of what they were expecting of the fiber optic cable when I went to a presentation on it around a year ago. If I remember correctly, the cable they use only has like a 20lb breaking strength. They stuff 25 miles of it into a can that's on a short leash to the vehicle, and it trails out something huge in the water column, basically goes with the flow. I'm pretty sure the cable is 1 use only; it's cheaper to cut it and start fresh for each dive. You can't really tell from that photo, but it's a pretty sizable machine. I was pretty surprised by it when I saw it in the shop the other day.
Pretty impressive stuff, especially for the number of people they had working on it. Nice guys, best of luck to them.
The WHOI site has some good stuff on it, I'm surprised no one linked to it.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=10076
scroll down for photos.
The balls are ceramic flotation spheres. The main housings are also ceramic with Ti endcaps. I have to admit I was feeling a little skeptic of what they were expecting of the fiber optic cable when I went to a presentation on it around a year ago. If I remember correctly, the cable they use only has like a 20lb breaking strength. They stuff 25 miles of it into a can that's on a short leash to the vehicle, and it trails out something huge in the water column, basically goes with the flow. I'm pretty sure the cable is 1 use only; it's cheaper to cut it and start fresh for each dive. You can't really tell from that photo, but it's a pretty sizable machine. I was pretty surprised by it when I saw it in the shop the other day.
Pretty impressive stuff, especially for the number of people they had working on it. Nice guys, best of luck to them.
The WHOI site has some good stuff on it, I'm surprised no one linked to it.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=10076
scroll down for photos.
¿uʍop ǝpısdn ʇı sı ʎɥʍ
Aqua... it's not a bad question. I think you will find primarily the reason is because many major countries (including America) have recently been able to expand their territory to 200 miles off of the coast. This helps "sweeten the pot" to divert money to research (which would help create the technology to find new large deposits of natural resources within that new area).
I think knowledge is great... explore away. Unfortunately, investors and governments often have different motives.
To explain why Nereus is important for deep ocean exploration here is a quick primer, 1) We can not prove that the theories regarding plate movement, there are lots of theories but proof is more difficult until you sample at deep depths. So to have a deep vehicle that can sample and photograph the deep ocean will help validate/disprove those theories. 2.) As an autonomous vehicle it will also be able to perform high resolution bathymetric and photographic surveys (i.e. give you a very accurate map of the ocean floor). These items are not possible in the deep trenches around the world where much these dyanmics are centralized. Why do we care about life down deep, well its there is one reason, another is all life on this planet effects every other life and understanding these lifeforms gives us greater knowledge of the whole and if you want to find on other planets these trenches will probaly be were its at.