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Alvin Submersible Retired After 40 Years Work
An anonymous reader writes "The legendary deep-sea manned submersible Alvin is retiring after 40 years of scientific work. Alvin has taken 12,000 people on over 4,000 dives, helping to confirm plate tectonics and continental drift. It discovered hydrothermal vents, salvaged a hydrogen bomb from the Mediterranean Sea and explored the Titanic. Alvin will be replaced by a larger vehicle that will come into service in 2008."
Is there any reason not to keep Alvin going along with its replacement? I'm sure some country or foundation is willing to run it. There's nothing top-secret in it, is there, considering that it is forty years old.
It is useful for a lot of research. Even though it is not as good as a new one, why not keep in it action?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
In the life of every scientific instrument comes the time when its capabilities are so much overshadowed by the more contemporary technology and its maintenance is such a drain on the funds that it simply must be retired. Sure you can do research with it, but it's low grade. They simply are not useful for good research anymore and maintaining them will take away funds from more important, new fields.
Personally, as a scientist, I don't much care what happens to what is essentially scrap metal at that point. In fact, I personally dismantled the equipment I did my PhD Thesis on in order to build another, better one. No tears shed there.
The owls are not what they seem
One of the best columns I ever wrote, and certainly one of the most fun to write, I wrote inside the Alvin. Not, I hasten to add, at the bottom of the ocean. It was in drydock down at Scripps Institute in San Diego at the time. I learned a lot about all sorts of things on that trip, including things like the esoteric outer reaches of battery charging, when you've got tons and tons of lead and acid to charge.
The magazine in which the column appeared was offered the opportunity to take Mr. P. on a dive, an opportunity which he would have accepted in a New York minute (hey, after all, he went for a boat ride on Grand Prismatic Spring: 160 degrees and no life jackets - what would be the point?), but as the trip would have cost the magazine the entire budget for publishing an issue, Mr. P. stayed sadly dry.
Alvin was an envelope-pusher from day one. The two halves of the titanium sphere that was the crew compartment were held together by one of the hardest titanium welding jobs ever done. The "penetrators" that carried the electronic wiring through the hull were always a concern. The inside of the sphere was unheated, so it "sweated" for the whole 12-hour dive. The pilot would check things out by wiping some of the "sweat" off the seam of a penetrator, if it looked like a "lot" of water, and would taste it for salt. Salt would have been a very, very bad sign.
Alvin did have an emergency ascent capability. Explosive bolts would shear the sphere clear of the boat-shaped outer chassis which contained the ballast, batteries and engines, allowing the sphere, a giant bubble, to race to the surface. The conning tower, though, was permanently attached, which meant that the sphere would spiral vigorously during the entire ascent, which would take twenty minutes or so. It was expected that the crew, under the best of circumstances, would be violently ill by the time they reached the surface, but they'd be alive.
This capability was never used, thank heavens.
Mr. Protocol wishes to thank Tom T. Tengdin for that golden opportunity.