Page 46: of Marine Technology Magazine (January 2022)

LANDER LAB #1

Figure 6.

Without winch and wire, or the big boat. The author, Kevin Hardy, then with Scripps, deploys

Ocean Lander DOV Patty into the 10,700m

Sirena Deep off Guam in 2011. The Munk/

Snodgrass design in? uence is easily seen. Our ship-of-opportunity is the 62-ft Super Emerald out of Saipan. 13. Shipping: A lander and its surface support gear can be shipped by overnight air freight from point-of-origin to point- of-operation, allowing rapid deployment to an active site of interest. One research group brought a small lander as check- on luggage to Fiji, where they used it to gather samples at a maximum depth of 2km.

14. Disruptive technology: Landers are simple enough to be used by any size institution anywhere in the world. I’ve mentored high school through graduate students in lander de- sign and construction, and had them build and deploy their own. Their use in the ocean at any depth for any length of time provides unique observational and sampling capability.

Ocean Landers are a UUV technology that empowers and en- ables all nations during the UN Decade of Ocean Science for

Sustainable Development (2021-2030).

It was noted by Ewing and Vine that locating the free vehicle after it had returned to the surface was a serious problem. To- day, Ocean Landers have the advantage of RDF and satellite trackers. They sink and rise pretty fast. Currents are relatively thin layers, and the vehicle passes through them fairly quickly, minimizing offset. The surface location problem has become more manageable.

Landers have been my muse to develop new undersea ve- hicle component technologies. Looking to send landers to the deepest trenches on a limited budget, I was looking for both buoyancy and housings. In 2001, I approached Gerald Albich, then General Manager of the German company Nautilus Ma- rine Service (NMS), manufacturers of the impressive Vitrovex line of hollow glass spheres for ocean science. My suggestion

Photo by Elizabeth Strickland, IEEE 46 January/February 2022

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