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Long-Running Underwater Robot Lost At Sea
this_boat_is_real writes "Somewhere off the coast of Chile a pioneering underwater robot named Abe lies in a watery grave today. The Autonomous Benthic Explorer was one of the first truly independent research submersibles, being both unmanned and un-tethered to its launching ship. While on its 222nd research dive on Friday all contact with the craft was lost, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has announced."
I think we are well and truly fucked.
all the movies form the fifties about giant sea monsters being released by earthquakes are true! We must prepare are selves by watching hours of scifi original movies! Its also no coincidence, 222nd dive? that's 1/3 evil.
And nobody on the sub engineering team thought, "hey, maybe we should add a ballast balloon that floats it to the surface if it loses all contact with the surface." Wow.
what? no skynet tag?
bet the robot became self-aware and decided "to hell with this....I'm making a break for it!"
Now, it's probably in league with those sharks with laser beams.
Who'd have thunk it would be an unmanned submersible that would first become self-aware?
/Oh, please let it be nuclear powered.
I wonder if it had any kind of watchdog controlled system to inflate a flotation device or anything? (If it did, it apparently didn't work)
You'd think it would be a sensible feature to have on such an expensive and unique piece of equipment.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Abe is now sleeping with the fishes.
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/309/
The Abyss is famous for its animation of the water tentacle. Way ahead of its time. Younger readers who have not seen it should check it out.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
...Charles Widmore must have been monitoring ABE when it somehow found the Island. I expect we'll see a fake press release showing ABE's resting place any time now.
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Underwater Robots, it's finally free!
Isn't this the episode where Gilligan finds a mysterious robot in the water and the professor tries to use it to communicate to the outside world, and the skipper hits Gilligan in the head with his hat?
After such an illustrious career shouldn't they use this as the basis of their next design only adding to it additional features that have been proven on more recent designs from other teams? I mean making all these one-off designs like all the underwater robots seem to be has to be the least efficient way to go from both a cash perspective as well as a getting science done perspective.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I was going to ask if they suspected that I had hacked the OS and made it meet me at sea so I could steal it ( as a joke ), and then
I realized that this would make a good drug smuggling bot and really with all seriousness, isn't it possible that foul play could be at work and I'm guessing the device is worth at least a couple bucks to somebody who wants to get under the radar, so to speak.
From TFA, it seems also that it could be asleep. Maybe it just overslept.
Those damn Russian water tentacles sneakin' around again.
Activate tearducts and proceed with robot mourning routine!
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Isn't this the same area that the "Big Bloop" was supposedly triangulated to?
and thanks for all the fish!
An implosion, ... would have caused all of ABE’s other spheres to implode
It's just the same as the way as a chain reaction at the Super Kamiokande neutrino observatory destroyed thousands of its photo-multiplier tubes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
A cron job didn't run.
(Posted at 03:47 GMT-6 14 March 2010)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The replacement for ABE is Sentry. http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=38095
The cost of running support ships limits the number of subs used and the amount of science which is done.
Hmmmm....Maybe it just ran away....
...something about "Should a man keep the sweat of his brow..."
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
It was a good film, but I don't think it was particularly popular. Not enough explosions, probably.
A pal had the special edition including "The Making Of..." which is worth a watch too. Apparently the female star sulked throughout the whole production.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ME? I believe it was only after they pounded on her chest for hours to do the drowning revivial scene. She left the set because after hours of filming the last take, the camera ran out of tape.
Film. The camera ran out of film.
You kids...
With the increasing capability of these things being able to explore more and more of the ocean's depths, they might be stumbling upon things certain people/governments don't want them too.
How 'bout the wreck of the Thresher (U.S. Nuclear powered submarine), or the Soviet nuclear sub that the Glomar Challenger tried to bring up (under cover as a geo-physics expedition run by Howard Hughes). I believe the Soviet sub had nuclear weapons on board (either as torpedos or missiles, maybe mines).
I think there may be a few nukes that were accidentally lost (there was a B-52 that dropped four of them off of the coast of Spain I think). The respective governments "claimed" to have recovered them. There's also tons of wadiowactive waste (sorry just saw Chekov in Star Trek) that Russia has dumped into the oceans; might make for a good "dirty" bomb.
My favorite is the jettisoned lunar module that the Apollo 13 crew used as a lifeboat to get them back to earth. One of its science experiments used plutonium. Shortly before re-entry it was released so that it would crash into the ocean in the Mariana's Trench. (I suppose the plutonium container was designed to survive re-entry amongst other things in case of a catastrophic accident during launch). Well now the Japanese have a R.O.V. capable of diving even there, the deepest place on the planet.
So these are just the things we know about. Maybe there was something poor ABE ran into that was someone didn't want uncovered. To keep their secrets safe would it be easy to put a mine that would be triggered by the rover's bright lights or sonar pings? Might be a lot cheaper than trying to haul up say an entire nuclear sub.
Isn't that a vehicle from James Cameron's "The Abyss"?
But watch the directors cut so that the ending actually makes some sense.
Well there are many sad to see it go but it did a lot of great research. WHOI has a few more autonomous underwater robots - check out whoi.edu. BTW since the design of ABE was shaped like the Enterprise from Star Trek it had a registration number of NCC-1701B on its side - WHOI engineers are Trekkies too. My company is a videography contractor for WHOI.
They don't make very many of them. They're often made with the best technology available at the time. They're usually made with a specific set of tasks in mind, then later modified. Abe was around 15 years old.
Really? I thought the directors cut was worse than the theatrical release.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I couldn't help to notice the similarities in this robot's design to the Starship Enterprise. As I looked closer it appears that somebody else had the same thought - the serial number on the robot is "NCC-1701B"!
How much did ABE cost? Is it worth a dive by another submersible to reacquire? Or is (was) it so autonomous that WHOI doesn't have a clear enough track to search from?
Apparently the female star sulked throughout the whole production.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sulked through almost every production she was ever in. Maybe one of the reasons she's only got 27 entries on her reel and everything since 2004 has been TV and hasn't been in a decent movie since 2000.
Be difficult talent long enough and word gets around. She was pretty hot as Carmen in Color of Money, that was just three years before The Abyss.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It became self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Could be a robot amusement park down there. With blackjack. And hookers.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The mods thought you were making a porn reference.
Better yet, see the director's cut. The added 20 or so minutes completely alter the film. It goes from a really good flick a nearly great flick. And Ed Harris is a total babe.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Much better. Made sense.
Anyone here notice the similarities between The Abyss and Avatar?
Nice Aliens
Nasty, psychotic military guy
Great special effects
A plot discernible in 45 seconds
Great special effects
Typical love story
Sparkly, glowing aliens
Great special effects.
Just sayin. (Actually liked them both).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thanks for that great explanation. Do you think that this is the reason why military subs don't go deep, because otherwise they would have to use an unwieldy oil bladder based bouyancy control system? I assume that if they did use such a system, when they flooded the ballast tanks in a crash dive a lot of oil would have to be "dumped" overboard; expensive, not easily replenished and leaves a big oil slick that would reveal your location (as opposed to a lot of quickly dispersing bubbles like in the movies).
So because of that, even though they can have titanium hulls and whatnot, military subs can't go below a couple of thousand meters. Regardless of their "crush depth" there must be a point of no return. What do you think?
In 2003, I was on a small team using a similar WHOI system called REMUS to take surveys of ports and waterways, looking for mines. We had been training with the system, mainly in Southern California and when Iraq started up, they decided that they wanted to try the new technology there. We did, and it was successful. http://www.joetalbot.net/pages/030401-N-3783H-075A.htm In the course of our training, we managed to get the things stuck, beached and lost several times despite a system that would take it to the surface when it's little PC-104 mind was blown. Remember, there are things down there (plants, critters, caves, rocks, ships and junk) that are unknown to us before these things are launched (that's often why we launch them, you know? To take surveys?). These things navigate underwater using a small network of buoy "transponders" the respond to pings from the unit. The slight response delay (caused by the water and very predictable) tells the unit how far it is from the buoy, who's locations are known to the units (windows) programming software. These things are pretty cool and useful, but they're also kind of primitive. We used to attach a "pinger" to the units so that when they got stuck, we could recover them with divers. A pinger is a small capsule that contains a device that periodically emits a 20-70 khz "ping" that is easily picked up by a hand held, very directional receiver carried by a diver. http://www.benthos.com/undersea-pingers-locators-product-overview.asp Given what the system is worth, I would imagine that it has a pinger for location as well.
... a local fishing net. If the Chinese figured it had aphrodisiac powers, they've probably eaten it by now.
Have gnu, will travel.
The engineers must've been Trekkies:
http://dsg.whoi.edu:90/ships/auvs/abe_description.htm
They should have suspected something when it said it was just going down to the corner store for a pack of smokes...
More because it would be a huge engineering investment for absolutely no military value. Having your submarine wandering around the ocean floor is pretty useless. I think most modern subs have maximum normal operating depths of five hundred metres or so.
[FUCK BETA]
Wouldn't they be able to 'fly' out of such situations ? "Simply put the nose upwards and set the throttle to Full Ahead" so to speak ...
Agreed, once you lose engines at such depth you're hosed big time(*), but then again I would assume there is quite some redundancy in said vehicles.
Just thinking about this, my only training have been "Hunt for the Red October" and the "688 Attack sub" manual ... the latter being very educational btw.
(*: I'm so funny =)
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Something like this would be VERY useful to a nation like China to grab on the way up. Hopefully, their was active sonor going around to make sure that nobody did that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pretty much any military sub able to operate for long times underwater is nuclear powered. With that as an energy source, you don't really need to worry about fine-tuning your buoyancy. You can just propel yourself up or down. These small research subs are battery-powered, so you don't want to waste energy fighting a slightly rising or slightly sinking craft. Fine-tuning their buoyancy one and getting it over with saves a lot of energy.
The depth limit on a big sub has more to do with the type of pressure hull they use. A military sub uses a cylindrical pressure hull. This results in unequal stresses in the hull around the endcaps and the bulkheads, making it weaker for the thickness of the hull. You could make one capable of reaching 5000 m of depth, but its hull would have to be unreasonably thick and it would probably sink like a rock without a huge oil-filled gondola above it.
The really deep submersibles use spherical pressure hulls. A sphere results in equal loading on the hull, allowing you to take maximum advantage of the hull material's strength, and thus minimizing the thickness. The deepest diving sub I know of with a cylindrical pressure hull is the US Navy's NR-1 which was recently taken out of service. It's nuclear powered, and can operate down to about 700 meters. Officially, it was used for oceanographic research and to investigate and recover items from sunken USN vessels (it helped with debris recovery from the space shuttle Challenger accident as well). Unofficially, everyone in the field knows it was used to help maintain SOSUS, recover stuff from sunken Soviet vessels, and wiretapping Soviet undersea cables.
Most navies also operate DSRVs, deep submergence rescue vehicles, to recover survivors from a sunken submarine. But those use a spherical pressure hull. Most of the submarine-like volume in front of and behind the center is filled with oil tanks for buoyancy. The outer fairing is simply for hydrodynamics.
I don't think they were technically aliens in The Abyss.
"Does anybody think this is a Russian water tentacle?"
Supposedly they came from outer space and settled in the deep trench because it was more hospitable. (I read the book).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!