A couple of weeks ago, we brought you news on Slice of SciFi about the Deep Flight Super Falcon vessel. The Falcon is a deep-sea exploration vessel, but it isn’t the only one attempting to explore the last frontier on our planet.
According to BBC News, the Nereus, a robotic sub is being prepped to explore one of the deepest parts of the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean. The Challenger Deep is over 11,000 meters (36,089ft) deep and has been visited only twice before by vessels by humans.
The $5m submarine will make the attempt after a series of increasingly deep dives.
“Instead of jumping directly into the deep end of the swimming pool with the vehicle, we’ll probably dip our toe in first,” said Andy Bowen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and one of the designers of Nereus.
“We’ll work at 1,000m, 4,000m, 8,000m and then take a deep breath and see if we can get to 11,000m.”
The Challenger Deep is the deepest-known part of the ocean, located in the Marianas Trench near the island of Guam in the west Pacific.
It is the deepest abyss on Earth at 11,000m-deep, more than 2km (1.2 miles) deeper than Mount Everest is high. At that depth, pressures reach 1,100 times the pressure at the surface.
Ian Rouse, head of the deep platforms group at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, described the project as a “great technical challenge”.
“[At less than] 6,500m deep (21,325ft) there are vehicles that can do a better job than Nereus due to its compromises in design,” he said. “However from 6,500m to 11,000m Nereus has the field pretty much to itself.”
Other teams, notably the British, French, Russian and Japanese will be watching the mission “with interest”.
“The Nereus team [is] very experienced in designing and building other underwater vehicles, so I have no doubt they will succeed,” said Rouse.
Golly. seaQuest here we come. 🙂