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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."
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.
"With the loss of the Challenger, the crash of the Helios, and now this, it makes me wonder what next."
Tragic demise of Bill Gates, I fear.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
... 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.
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]
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.
Next is learning from these mistakes. Like we have done throughout history.
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$tar -xvf
The article states that the beacon (only emitted at the surface) was briefly heard, this means that it at least *hit* the surface after the tether broke, thougth I agree, it most likely sank, and implosion of the sort you predict is unlikely.
What's next? More spacecraft exploding, more experimental aircraft crashing, and engineers and scientists learning a lot from it. This isn't a fairy-tale world; pushing the boundaries of known science and engineering is bound to have some hic-ups and failures. Think of all the test pilots who have died, the scores rockets that blew up in the 50's and 60's, and the ships lost at sea hundreds of years ago. When the cabin of Apollo 1 burst into flames and killed three people, we didn't abandon the program, we just figured out what went wrong, fixed it, and moved on and landed on the moon what, seven times? That progress at the cost of a failure invigorated at least one nation and led to greater public interest in aerospace, without which Helios wouldn't even have a chance to fail.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
"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.
Science is all about failure, hell even the way we look at experimentation is ALL about failure. You never prove that something worked, you only prove that it didn't catachimically explode in your face, forcing your funding agency to bludgen you to death.
Admittedly that is no the kind of thing you are talking about, but when you are doing somethign "experimental," you know going to space, trying to keep somethign at 1 bar pressure over a trench that extends 7 miles down; in an oncoming typhoon no less, failure is going to happen. It just adds to the list of thigns that you have to address when you rethink and revisit the problem.
Pacific.
Is it fascism yet?
It just set a new depth record. 8^>
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
"Release the Kraken!"
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
'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.
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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.