NASA launches submarine to hunt for life in the mysterious depths of the sea
Scientists from NASA and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have teamed up with a $1.2 million grant from a private organization to research, design and build a new robot to explore the deep sea floor (hadal zone).
The team has named the new drone Orpheus, after the legendary Greek hero who dived into the depths of Hades, king of the underworld. Scientists hope Orpheus will one day find new bottom-dwelling sea creatures and take pictures of deep-sea life.
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“They are almost completely unexplored and it's a very harsh environment to do exploration,” said NASA robotics research engineer John Leichty, who designed and built the Orpheus rover.
Scientists at WHOI thought it was possible to get a state-of-the-art deep-sea vehicle to the bottom of the ocean and achieved it in 2014, but it didn't work out. So for this project, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory like Leichty are hopeful.
The test robot is known to have reached 176m below the surface, still above the hadal zone, so clearly Orpheus isn't ready for the deepest depths yet.
“There’s a lot of work we need to do to improve its autonomy so it can do more complex tasks. That’s especially true when it comes to navigating underwater,” Leichty said.
The Orpheus is equipped with four Go-Pro-like cameras (with flash), two to help the car navigate itself and one to capture the scenery.
During the 176m test dive, Leichty said, Orpheus's cameras glimpsed some "crab-like" and "tube-shaped" creatures. The WHOI team also combined 40 images of the seafloor taken by Orpheus to create a 3D picture.
Currently, scientists are still continuing to make efforts to further perfect this special unmanned robot.
