By: Jason
Hello folks of the near-trench geodesy community! I am Jason, your friendly remote operated vehicle that roams the deep ocean and places orange ball looking things on to the ocean bottom. This is my third stint with you all so I figured it is the perfect time to introduce myself and provide an idea about a regular day in my life as I explore the ocean bottom.
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| Me, as drawn by Madeleine Lucas |
Today I had a late start to the day. We had a late night yesterday and I got to sleep only at 12:30am (local time). So I appreciated the late start. My crew did some maintenance on me by poking and tugging at my innards to make sure I am well for another dive. The science crew tells me that today I am taking the REMy (a recoverable electronic module) frame down to one of the strainmeters. REMy gave us some hiccups the last time we did this so we are taking extra precautions and running extra checks on REMy before I dive into the ocean.
I dove into the ocean at noon (local time). Today, the target depth is only 786m which is significantly less than yesterday's. So we are looking at a shorter commute time (also no traffic in the ocean bottom obviously). My crew makes sure that they are extra careful when they lower me down to the ocean. I like my folks. Today, I am not carrying some of the usual tools that I have carried on the previous dives to the ocean bottom as part of this cruise. Usually, my two arms wield a knife to cut some of the ropes that holds the orange ball-looking things together and a brush to brush off some of the gunk from the metal-looking things (they call them benchmarks). It is fun to brush off the debris from the plates while I try to shoo away the crabs and rockfish that have called the benchmark home. At times, when I land on the ocean bottom, a cloud of dust and sediment blows over all my cameras and makes me go blind partially. But my crew brings me back on pretty quickly and I can see again.
The game plan for today seems chill. Just go down to the bottom with the REMy and wait in darkness to check if REMy works properly or not. REMy communicates with the strainmeter at the bottom using optical or light pulses. They are supposed to blink at each other. So I waited with REMy in the dark and saw it blink at the electronics of the strainmeter and hoped that it would blink back. Initially, the first blink test did not work (we got ghosted). But we re-tried the comms and voila! it worked! It is still slow but hey, better than last time (Am I right?). Weirdly, I have not seen any major creature today during my dive. Maybe I scared them off. I look scary on the outside but I am gentle with my ocean friends. Some times, the gentle ocean friends also come with me on my basket for a ride along.
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| Me :) |
Next thing that the science crew tells me is that I have to tap on one of the metal plates with my arms. Happy to oblige! This metal plate has a giant crab on it but I keep my distance. My crew makes me tap on the metal plate three times. Everything looks good and so we are off to the other site. After another dust cloud, I got to the other site and found the cable that I left behind during my last dive in a milk crate. My crew helped me get the cable fitted into the other REMy (Dummy one). A big fish came to check on our operations and swam away. I got the cable plugged into the dummy one without any hassle. Pretty chill times. We finished with our tasks really early today. Woohoo!!
Then we had some fun time with the new recruits. Each one of them got to drive me around in the ocean bottom. I chased some fish friends and jellies. We had a great time all around till my crew decided to haul me back up to the surface with the old REMy on board. All in all, today was a good day and my crew tells me that the science goals have been achieved for this cruise! Time to take a nap now. Until next time.
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| My crew working on my inner systems |
PS: I am a remote operated vehicle. So this article was written remotely by Meghomita Das (www.meghomita.com)
Cute idea for a blog post!
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