Jan. 17: Iceberg Trouble and a Little Luck

Jan. 17, 2011

A monumental day here in the South!  We sent out 2 REMUS’s today, which we have only done once before in a controlled environment. And down here, it is definitely not a controlled environment. 

We knew that some of the penguins had been feeding locally so we sent one vehicle to the south and one to north to cover a fairly significant chunk of the local waters. We dropped the first vehicle in the water, made sure it was okay and then went over to the other side of the island to drop off the second vehicle since there was an iceberg that was blocking our path. 

Otherwise we would have dropped them both in at the same spot and went back to lab.  When we arrived we found another iceberg sitting on the start location, so we had to do a little reprogramming of the mission to move the start point beyond the iceberg. 

After letting the vehicle go and keeping the other vehicle in the back of our mind we went over to look at an ice arch and some glaciers and then headed back to get some lunch. We had a sailboat visiting from Australia and the station invited them to eat lunch with us, which I’m sure was a treat for them after being on a sailboat for a while. 

I didn’t get to talk to them, but one of the scientists here went to explore the boat and found out it was built for an around the world sailboat race where it placed fourth.  It isn’t that big of a boat to be playing around on the big ocean.

I headed back to the lab to work on some of the data we had been collecting and some other work for projects back home. At the same time I was watching the computer and waiting for the vehicles to call in over the satellite phone. We got a couple of successful calls and were feeling good when one of the vehicles called in and said it had a leak. 

Of course it was at the farthest point from us in the mission. We got its location and took some notes on the other vehicle and then headed out to find it. During lunch we had noticed that one of the icebergs was heading directly into the path of the where the other REMUS was going to be coming home.  So now we had to worry about finding one vehicle and then racing back to make sure the other vehicle didn’t run into the iceberg. 

We made our way out to where the leaky vehicle was supposed to be and started looking for it with our towfish (same one we used to get the vehicle off of the bottom the other day). We were having trouble locating the vehicle because it was giving random distances and always seemed to be the same distance away no matter where we went. 

We went to a spot where we thought it was located based on our triangulation and we didn’t get a single ping. A little frustrated, we started to head inshore and Mark spotted it a hundred meters away, which the towfish should have seen without a problem. 

Confused and a little worried we picked up the vehicle and headed back to save the other vehicle. Another fortunate thing for us was the weather. There were no waves and no wind today so the ocean was like a lake. There would have been a good chance that we would not have found the vehicle if the ocean was rough.

We made it back to the iceberg, a little worried that the second vehicle had already arrived and maybe crashed into it, but found the iceberg had moved just far enough away from the path of the vehicle and that the vehicle had not gone by yet. 

Everything was going to be okay.  A couple more gray hairs I guess. 

We spent the rest of the night taking the leaking vehicle apart and looking at both missions to see what happened during their flight through the ocean. It doesn’t look like anything was damaged inside the vehicle, but we will have to wait and see how it flies tomorrow or the next day.