Dave and Brian's Excellent Adventures

Wednesday May 17, 2006

Today was a very exciting day. We had just picked up the vehicles, off the bottom of the ocean. As we were steaming to the next location, to look for stuff. Dr. Ballard noticed something: The ship has a device called a Knudsen. It is a depthfinder that shows a graph of what the current depth is under the ship and what the depth was for the last 30 minutes. Dr. Ballard happened to look up and noticed a bump. He yelled, "It's a ship! Turn the ship around! It's a ship!" The ship obliged, as they should he's the one paying the bill. We turned the ship around. We dropped Hercules and Argus and found the Imperatritsa Ekaterina II. Built in 1888, and torpedoed in 1908. All because Dr. Ballard HAPPENED to look up. Pretty cool.

The control van (all pictures shown above) is the van we control the vehicles from. The bottom picture just shows the orientation of the van, on the second level, with the satellite dish on top. The top picture is the left half of the van. It contains 5 racks that have all the equipment that control Hercules and Argus, the 10 computers, a router, RTS Adam system (Intercom) and a couple tape machines. This is where I sit.

As some people have asked in the past, and the hardest question to answer; "Brian, what do you do?" Well, like working the Olympics, it's the same here: A lot. Before we left, my father and I checked all of the equipment in the van to make sure it was working (more specifically the video equipment. We don't touch Rack 1. That's where the equipment for talking with and controlling Hercules and Argus. We don't want to touch Rack 1). While my father and I were in Italy, during the Olympics, Tom Perley and Jeff Holt wired up cables between the image van and control van, after the vans had been set up on the Endeavor.

When I got here I checked that the equipment had survived the transit across the Atlantic Ocean, fixed any issues that arose, and got ready for being "On Watch". The ship's crew are on schedule of 12-4, 4-8, 8-12. We follow the same schedule. It was difficult to get used to, but after awhile seemed to make sense. I'm on the 4-8 watch. Which means I get up at 3am, go to the control van at 3:45 am and take over the video position for the person who had the 12-4 watch. I work until 7:45 am and have breakfast. If it's been a hard day the day before, I'll take a nap. If there's a lot of work to do, I'll keep working. Lunch is at 11:30am. I go back to work at 3:45 pm. and finish at 7:45 pm. If there's nothing to work on immediately, I go to bed, and repeat. It's a 16 hour day, if there's lot's of work to do. It's MUCH longer, if there's stuff to do after my night watch, that's a REALLY long day.

During the time the vehicles are in the water my main job is to control the HD cameras on Hercules and Argus; to a point. We control iris (darker or brighter), focus (fuzzy or clear), and zoom (skinny or fat) of each of the HD cameras. There's one rule with this responsibility: Don't zoom the camera without instruction from the pilots! If you zoom the camera and they aren't ready for this change, they will assume that the vehicle is racing forward, typically something it's looking at, like a wall or something bad. That is our main job, while the vehicles are down under water. The other jobs include: changing tapes being recorded (as each of the HD cameras are being recorded), make any changes to the intercom or video monitors through out the ship, and the end all: fix it when it breaks.

The second picture shows the position that the pilots and navigator sit. They have the same three big monitors that the image van has, and the same small monitors the image van has. This is where all the controls and joy sticks are for the vehicles.