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."

Comments

Re:No remote control?

[WhiteBandit]

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.

Re:hmmm

[Captain Nitpick]

I'm no naval engineer, but wouldn't it make sense for the onboard computer to surface the sub if communication to the ship above is lost? Then, once it surfaces, have it emit a distress signal that the master ship can hone in on

READ THE [CENSORED] 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.

Thanks

[flikx]

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.

Re:Thanks

[zangdesign]

Hey, remember to put some screen doors in the submarine so it's easy to tell if you're underwater or not. And so you can step outside for a whizz and a smoke.

Re:Recent events

[Muhammar]

"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.

It's not lost...

[breon.halling]

... it's hanging out with James Cameron. ;)

Nitpick

[crashnbur]

I know this is a tedious point, but there are four oceans, and not everyone knows where Challenger Deep is. Also, it wouldn't hurt to let everyone know that Challenger Deep is allowed to be confused with the Marianas Trench, since Challenger Deep is the distinct section of the trench that reaches the deepest below the surface, almost seven miles.

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.

Re:Nitpick

[whm]

I know this is a tedious point, but there are four oceans, and not everyone knows where Challenger Deep is.

This may even be more tedious ... but how can you write a comment like that, and still not tell us proles where the hell it's at? :)

Re:hmmm

[anubi]

I just read the article.. and it sure looks like there is a bug in there somewhere. The article claimed exactly the design you describe.

"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."

I would assume the sub has local batteries, albeit rechargeable via the tether, for cacheing energy. As you noted, in the event the sub detected its tether being broken ( I would probably try to sense a loss of power feed ), use the cached energy in the battery to blow the ballast tanks.. or maybe have some sort of fire extinguishing system using liquid CO2 that could be routed into the ballast tanks to insure floatation in failsafe mode.

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.

Re:Recent events

[Mt._Honkey]

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.

Hang on there cowboy. This probably just needs to be filed under the "Shit Happens" category. Spacecraft have always been blowing up because it is mighty difficult to build something that reliable goes through all that punishment. Experimental aircraft have always crashed, because they're experimental. You do experiments, and when something crashes you know what not to do. This sub was lost because it ended up in an extreme environment.

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.

Location of The Deep

[OctaneZ]

"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.

The ocean in question would be the

[DoraLives]

Pacific.

Re:hmmm

[Almost-Retired]

'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.