Piccard versus the sea monster: if you’ve been reading along with this blog you’ll remember that a while ago we lost control of the waveglider named Piccard. Telemetry and almost all systems were just fine. We had lost control of the rudder, so Piccard was drifting. We had all kinds of theories about what had happened. Fortunately, this happened reasonably close to Hawaii, so we were able to go out and pick it up. But once we did, the cause was amazing: it had been seriously savaged by a major shark. The body of the glider sustained no real damage. Some wicked-looking scratches, but that’s all they were. We found a fragment of a tooth lodged in a seam, still no real damage. It took an impressive beating and nothing mechanical broke. Even the rudder module was in fine shape and totally usable. But the one exposed cable got a mighty chomp, and that’s all it took. It’s the only real shark damage we’ve ever had, despite many years in Hawaiian waters.
On November 17th, 2011, in San Francisco, Liquid Robotics
launched four Wave Gliders that will travel the longest distance at sea ever completed by an unmanned marine vehicle. The robots will travel together to Hawaii and then take separate routes across the Pacific, one pair arriving in Japan and the other in Australia. While at sea, the Wave Gliders will be routed across regions never before remotely surveyed and will continuously transmit valuable data on salinity and water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen.
Note: As solar power is available or unavailable we are cycling the sensors so you may see gaps in the data. This is unfortunate but expected.