It looks like a giant yellow kazoo, but the Remus 6000, the deepwater recovery robot from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, gets the job done. In this case, the recovery of the wreckage of an Air France jet that crashed in mid-ocean.
This from the Institute’s news release:
A search team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has located the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 some 3,900 meters, or nearly 2.5 miles, below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil’s northeastern coast.
The team left the port of Suape, Brazil, aboard the vessel Alucia on March 22, arriving at the search site on March 25. After one week of searching, one of the mission’s three autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), the REMUS 6000s, detected debris on the seafloor. A second vehicle was dispatched to the area for more detailed sonar mapping and photographic imaging. The images it brought back were relayed to BEA, French air safety investigation authority, which identified the wreckage as the Airbus A 330. All three REMUS vehicles are currently mapping the area to get a comprehensive view of the accident site.
Flight 447, a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Jeneiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members. WHOI led the search under the direction of the BEA, Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses.
The search mission was the fourth attempt to locate the aircraft. WHOI also participated in the third search effort. WHOI Senior Engineer Mike Purcell was the chief of sea search operations for the mission.
“We were confident from phase three [the last search attempt] that if we were searching in the right area, the vehicles’ sonar could pick out the aircraft,” said David Gallo, the project leader at WHOI.
The group’s Remote Environmental Monitoring Units are labtop driven underwater vehicles produced by the Institutes Oceanographic Systems Lab (OSL) “a team of engineers, technicians and staff define Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUVs) concepts and build them into reality. Starting off with a small 100 meter depth rated two person portable vehicle just ten years ago, our team now designs larger more powerful vehicles designed to visit depths up to 6000 meters. Our mission is to provide the latest and most cutting edge technology for AUVs and their objectives relating to science and military applications.”
David Gallo, WHOI’s director of special projects, said researchers used three automated underwater vehicles called Remote Environmental Monitoring UnitS (REMUS), which operate at depths up to 3.7 miles and work underwater for up to 20 hours at a time.
On this mission, the torpedo-shaped units worked to simultaneously map the ocean floor using sonar. When anomalies were spotted, a REMUS sub would dive down closer and photograph the area of interest.
REMUS was developed at the oceanographic institution, and the subs are manufactured at Hydroid Inc., a Bourne company.
The recovery mission, aboard the vessel Alucia, left the harbor of Suape, Brazil, on March 22 with a crew of 34.
The search for the plane is historic because of the number of underwater robots and the rugged terrain that’s like an “underwater Rocky Mountains,” Gallo said.
“Three (automated underwater vehicles) from a single ship in the deep ocean has never been done before,” Gallo said. “Onboard the ship we had the most sophisticated deep-sea search capabilities on the planet.”
The search area was a swath of ocean approximately 3,900 square miles, which made the plane a needle in a very large, very wet haystack, Gallo said.
WHOI researchers performed a similar search for two months last year, but were unsuccessful. This time around, Gallo said, the French authorities decided to focus on the immediate area of the plane’s last known contact.
They found the plane 10 days into what was expected to be a three-month expedition.
“We just had to be sure we were given the right haystack, and this time we chose the right one,” Gallo said.
The WHOI team is now using REMUS to create an extensively detailed map of the wreck site, Gallo said, which will help French officials with recovery efforts.
More here from the Christian Science Monitor.