Dave and Brian's Excellent Adventures

Today has been more exciting than yesterday. First, we picked up Dr. Bob Ballard and Mike Durbin (our Satellite guy). Now that Dr. Ballard is on board we’re going to be exploring more exciting locations. We’ve found a barge and a patrol boat, which seems to have been used as target practice with torpedoes during the 1940’s. We’ve also found most of a single person airplane. Very exciting stuff!

We have three “Vans” that we use: A satellite van, image van, and control van. As you may remember, a “Van” is what a shipping container is called. Because the Endeavor is a small ship, there isn’t a lot of room, so a couple of the vans’ contents have been removed and set up inside the ship. The satellite van’s contents were moved to the inside of the ship (bottom picture). Amazingly enough, it only takes up the last rack and a half on the right hand side, considering all it does.

Typically a satellite dish sits on the non-moving ground pointed at one satellite. Our satellite is on a ship. The ship’s on the sea. AND, the sea is NEVER calm. There are several gyros that control the dish’s direction as it senses a change in the ship’s movement. There are two times when we can lose our signal with the satellite: 1. If the ship tips more than 20 degrees in less than 7 seconds (which would be REALLY bad for the people on board) the gyros can’t correct fast enough for the dish to keep track of the satellite. 2. If the ship makes 8 left turns in a row (or makes two complete circles) the wire inside the satellite can only be twisted so much. When this occurs it turns 720 degrees, until it becomes untwisted. The satellite passes video and audio that we are transmitting to Seattle, Mystic Aquarium, and URI. It passes internet and phones. It is our link to the States from anywhere we can get a satellite connection.

The other picture shows the image van. This is the van where the scientists sit and watch different monitors. The large monitors usually show the two HD cameras (one on Hercules and one on Argus). The third large monitor usually shows a multi-screen display. It shows all of the cameras on Hercules and Argus, on one screen. The smaller screens are setup to show the computer screens of the 10 computers in the control van (next Blog). These are the computers that help the pilots control the vehicles as well as view information the vehicles are collecting (ie sonar, water temp, pressure, salinity, etc)