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World's Deepest-Diving Unmanned Submarine Lost
XenonOfArcticus writes "Kaiko, the world's deepest-diving submarine was lost in in late May off Japan, after it snapped its tether as a typhoon approached. Kaiko entered the record books in 1995 by diving 36,008 feet to the bottom of the Challenger Deep - the ocean's deepest point."
I am concerned about the recent setbacks in many scientific fields. With the loss of the Challenger, the crash of the Helios, and now this, it makes me wonder what next.
Nice troll.
Either that, or you need to think about how well radio works in water (think ELF, for example).
Why would they not design the sub to return to the surface and broadcast with a trasponder if it's tether is severed?
Taken directly from the article:
Kaiko is designed to float to the surface and emit a tracking signal if its tether is broken. Although searchers briefly detected the beacon, they were unable to locate the probe and suspected it has either drifted off site or sunk to the bottom.
READ THE [CENSORED] ARTICLE
But then again, I could be wrong.
On behalf of all naval engineers, I would like to thank you. You see, with all the design tradeoffs involved in engineering a submarine, we completely forgot to add any useful safety features or redundancy of any kind. Thank you very much for you excellent insight, we will incorporate these obvious, yet overlooked features into the next generaion of unmanned submersibles.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
yep... I'm an idiot. I was distracted when I RTFA and I missed that paragraph.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
... it's hanging out with James Cameron. ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
An interesting article about how to calculate the ocean's depth was put together by Nathan Becker, a student at the University of Hawaii when the report was written in 2001.
Given that the sub hasn't returned to the surface, my (mostly uneducated) guess is that it's been destroyed. How? Probably an implosion of equipment.
Due to the extreme pressure at depth, failure of a seal on anything waterproof could set off a dangerous pressure wave capable of severly damaging the craft - it would be like a depth charge. Heck, even a *light* for the camera system imploding at depth could do this (which is why they're so heavily armored in the first place).
I wonder what the end of the teather looks like?
I'm just glad the sub wasn't manned.
I am not privy to the design plans, but somehow this whole episode reeks of a malfunction of some failsafe system. I find it difficult to conceive of some design engineer not hedging his bets against something as inevitable as a severed tether.
Another poster noted RF being lossy underwater. My guess would been to place piezoelectric sonar transducers on the hull and ping them in the event the sub considered itself lost. It wouldn't take that much energy, but if you knew what kind of racket you were listening for, it would stand out from the normal oceanic noises.. kinda like those old war sub stories of marooned submariners taking a wrench and tapping out the morse code for SOS on the steel hull of the submarine.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Doesent this sound like a Steven Spielberg movie?
Im certian the "World's Deepest-Diving Unmanned Submarine" is now in the World's Deepest ocean bottom.
Good thing its unmanned.
is and is based on only the tiny [linear] fraction of the range of actual physical conditions which exist on just this one [3rd] rock from the [G3] sun.
Simple concept such as 'blow ballast' have NO relation at all to the conditions that exist just 7 miles from home, when that 7 miles is DOWN and there's WATER ALL THE WAY. IIRC the closest thing to Fail-Safe under such conditions is [was] a flotation envelope filled with gasoline and ballasted to negative with iron 'scrap' held in place by electro-magnets.
This [/.] collection of the brightest and best the species has produced overwhelmingly FAILS TO COMPREHEND the most basic natural laws when the subject is any farther from home than thumb+mouth=suck.
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
Oh sure, mod me all the way down to Challenger Deep, so I can share the fate of that submarine... :)
Allright, I guess I forgot about issues with radio wave propagation in water. I hang my head in shame instead.
Have EVDO, will travel.
"Map" of location of Marianas Trench
Wikipedia entry for Challenger Deep
The Trench is located east of the Matianas Islands
Hope this helps you find it.
Pacific.
Is it fascism yet?
There are actually 5 oceans. In 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization defined the Southern Ocean, all water below 60 degrees south.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
how do you miss a paragraph??? Seriously, it's not like it was hiding or something.
After the screen-door submarine joke, he would throw in "Hey, don't laugh, it kept the fish out."
it's called my dad (who had a stroke a couple years ago) called me downstairs since he needed me. When I came back to my computer, I started reading at the wrong paragraph. It was a two sentence paragraph, not exactly a paragraph that extended for 53 pages
"Release the Kraken!"
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
The answer I always give is "All the way to the bottom." It's a flip answer that submariners give that underscores the seriousness of the environment and the price of failure. It also underscores the flippancy of sub sailors. :)
Remember that the US lost the Thresher and the Scorpion in the late unpleasantness of the so-called cold war. Read "Blind Man's Bluff" if you want to know just how much stranger truth can be than fiction.
Hide with Pride,
MM1/SS
I've lost more than that in your mom's hole.
'scuse me, but how are you going to blow the tanks when the exterior pressure is sufficient to keep your liquid CO2 liquid by a factor of 20+. CO2 can be kept liquid at a pressure of a few hundred psi at room temps, somewhat less at the somewhat lower water temp. In the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the external pressure is in the range of 15,500 psi. Your liquid CO2 may even be a solid.
What you do is drop (release) the ballast weight that made it heavier than water and become lighter, in the case of the Trieste, something like 9 tons of ballast was released when it was time to come back up.
--
Cheers, Gene, who knows a wee bit about the Trieste since it was wearing tv cameras I helped build when it made that dive. I was working as an ET at Oceanographic Engineering in San Diego at the time.
Have they checked Pepperland? Maybe, one of the Blue Meanies got it.