Dear All,
For those interested in a suitable graphic for future vehicles - the urls;
http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/autosub/
and
http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/OTD/asub/labels.html
provide some indication of what the real-world AUTOSUB vehicle looks
like - scarcely ideal for what woul dbe needed on Europa, I am sure -
but this at least provides an up-to-date reality check on what can
currently be done with a free-swimming robot submarine in an ocean.
Specifically - the shape is what one gets when aiming for maximum
efficiency in terms of minimising drag and maximising control whilst
moving. I have a cut-away version of the upper image available as a
.pdf file if anyone cares to request it.
AUTOSUB has a range of 500km of pre-programmable flight and just
completed its first study under the Antartic ice-shelf and a few
icebergs (order 100s of metres only, I'm afraid - not kilometres yet).
Details on the web-site at:
http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/PR/NEWS/
AUTOSUB is intelligent enough to be able to operate in survey mode
either maintaining a range of one or more fixed depths for set times
or else operating in terrain following-mode along a programmed x-y
course - e.g. flying at a constant height above the seafloor or,
equally applicable, at a constant depth below the underside of an
overlying iceberg/thick icy crust (you can imagine).
As to science payloads, to date the big areas I have gotten excited
about are - equipping the vehicle with in situ chemical sensors (my
own work is mostly on looking for deep sea hydrothermal vents - e.g.
in the Arctic - by sniffing for their chemical exhaust) and equipping
the vehicle with side-scanning sonar so that you can produce
geological maps of what you fly over which, again, can be either the
underlying seafloor if near-bottom in an ocean or - equally plausibly
- could be structural images of the underside of an icy layer
floating on top of your favourite ocean - whichever you prefer.
To give you a ball-park figure: current imaging technology in Earth's
oceans is a function of how close you fly to the bottom - but at a
height of 100-500m up you can use soundwaves to make maps of the
seafloor in strips that are 2-6km wide from any single survey-line
that the vehicle occupies.
NB There are other vehicles out there too which will do more detailed
stuff on shorter length scales - check out the ABE vehicle at Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA:
http://www.marine.whoi.edu/ships/auvs/abe_description.htm
- which even happens to look like the USS Enterprise, just to rankle
with the anti-Trekkers!
Meantime, my reply to Jayme Blaschke's question - Who should we send
on a manned trip? would definitely be a variation of an oceanographer
- specifically a biogeochemist who could detect/interpret in situ
sensor signals of both inorganic and organic chemical signals in the
water column. Inorganic signals to tell you whether you had any
evidence, locally, for the right "building-block" conditions (notably
redox potential) for useful reactions to occur and
biochemical/organic signals to tell you whether any useful organic
synthesis (from my admittedly Carbon-oriented perspective) was
actually underway. If you could afford the luxury of a
glaciologist/geologist to tell you about what was going on nearby
(I'm assuming anything useful/interesting - as in Earth's Oceans will
preferentially occur near either the uppermost or deepest boundaries)
that would be ideal.
And that leaves two berths for those engineers people were on about
previously! (Or maybe a pilot?)
Best wishes, Chris
--
____________________________
Dr Chris German
Southampton Oceanography Centre
Southampton, SO14 3ZH, UK
Tel: +44 (0)2380 596542; Fax: +44 (0)2380 596554
http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/research.html
==
You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
