NOAA Successfully Deploys Wave Glider Robots In Live Test During Hurricane Sandy
NOAA deployed a… Wave Glider named Mercury in the Atlantic earlier this week about 100 miles east of Tom’s River, N.J., just off the soon-to-be devastated Jersey Shore.
Mercury met Hurricane Sandy head on, streaming back realtime data on the storm as it came charging inland on Monday. Most notably, Mercury recorded winds as high as 70 knots (80 miles per hour) and a plunge in barometric pressure of over 54.3 millibars, troughing at 946 millibars just as Sandy was making landfall.
NOAA plans to eventually field entire fleets of these self-propelled, wave-powered instrument platforms along with faster moving counterparts (made from modified EMILY robots) that can actually keep pace with a storm (the slower-moving Wave Gliders are meant to position themselves in front of a storm as it blows over).
The data they collect will go a long way toward helping meteorologists improve their understanding of how different storms develop and the models they use to predict their paths and intensities—and hopefully save lives.
(via NOAA’s New Storm-Chasing Robot Survives Sandy And Reports Back | Popular Science)
Open ROV: Crowd-Funded Open Source Robotic Undersea Exploration Platform
It all started with a kid who wanted to explore a cave that was rumored to contain sunken treasure.
OpenROV is an open source underwater robot for exploration and education. We’re a community of DIY Ocean Explorers committed to developing open source technology to empower more people to explore and study underwater environments…
We want this to be a sustainable adventure. Our plan is to get user feedback from people who build and operate OpenROV’s to make the design even better and more fitted toward the community’s needs. We plan to continue selling OpenROV Kits (and assembled OpenROVs) on our website as well as payloads and accessories for specific uses. We also hope that by building a strong community of people who understand the hardware and its applications, we’ll be able to develop ways of doing better science and exploration in more remote and interesting places.
(via OpenROV - The Open Source Underwater Robot by OpenROV — Kickstarter ht BoingBoing)
SeaOrbiter to begin construction this October.
The SeaOrbiter is part submarine, part research vessel and has been in the planning stages for 12 years. Now construction of the US$43 million vessel is scheduled to begin in October, and could be on the seas by late 2013.
The vessel will be 58 metres high, with 50% of it underwater, allowing scientists constant access to underwater study.
Designed to drift with ocean currents, the vessel will generate the majority of its power for life-support systems and propulsion to avoid other ships and storms from renewable energy, including solar, wind and wave power, Fuchs says. A side project is underway in conjunction with EADS, the European defense and space systems conglomerate, to develop a biofuel as the ship’s main power source.
(ht 8bitfuture ht futurist-foresight)
