For tonight’s class, both groups took a field trip to the Chase Ocean Engineering Laboratory on Campus. One half of our tour was in the telepresence room, where we learned about two vessels that do underwater ocean mapping, the Okeanos Explorer and the Nautilus. We were able to see live feed from the Okeanos which is currently doing research in the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, if you visit http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos, you will be able to see live feed from their underwater cameras! The other half of our tour was in the High Bay area of the lab. Here we visited the engineering pool and were invited to drive ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) under the water! We also had the opportunity to “play” in an Augmented Reality Sandbox. A computer takes the height measurements of the sand in the box and creates a virtual topographic map, coloring the terrain by height. As we played with the sand, we created new topographic maps! We learned a lot tonight and had a lot of fun!
Visit www.ccom.unh.edu for more information about the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping.