Washington Post: Across the Atlantic, gliding on density pushups, calling home all the way…
In yesterday’s Washington Post David Brown shared with readers a sentimental visit with a sojourning robot nick-named Scarlet by operators – but listed as RU-27 in the inventory.
The news is that a long-finned torpedo, packing batteries, instruments, and telemetry gear, is the first such device to cross an ocean. In 221 days the machine – alternately adjusting its bouyancy to either sink or rise slowly – bobbed its leisurely way from New Jersey to Spain. It dropped as deep as 600 feet, then rose again. At the surface it used an Iridium satellite phone in its tail to refresh instructions operator scattered around the world, changing direction for each leg if so ordered. When they got their hands on it – or, on her as some seem to have regarded the machine – some of the machine’s Rutgers University handlers hugged it. There were tears.
Brown eventually breaks free of the sentimental aspect of the story, compares this one and those that follow to the weather balloons meteorologists use to track weather, provides extensive detail on how oceanography is finally finding ways to monitor the seas in real time and with massive data loads, and other important detail. He closes with a remarkable overlap of this voyage with another one long ago.
I’ve tracked stories of the meanderings of gliders before, such as here.
Other recent stories:
- Newark Star-Ledger (Dec 9) Brian Whitley: Spanish town celebrates Rutgers University ocean glider’s trip across the Atlantic ; This is good – the probe was star of a town parade.
- Newark Star-Ledger (Aug 22) Tomas Dinges: Unmanned submarines glide across the ocean, putting Rutgers at leading edge of exploration ;
- NYTimes (May 3) Lisa W. Foderaro : Rutgers Uses Robot Sub to Interest Students in Marine Sciences ;
- Charlie Petit
