James Cameron completes 5 mile deep dive, in preparation for upcoming Race to Inner Space

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446474]

http://deepseachallenge.com/latest-news/cameron-to-walsh-on-record-8k-dive-youd-have-loved-it/

>Don,

>The 8000m dive went very well. Not an unqualified success, since the manip was balky and my push core sediment sample washed out on ascent because the sample door wouldn’t stow all the way, and because of the speed of the flow over the vehicle on ascent (5 knots average). But overall the vehicle performed like a champ. Plenty of power, and even though I lost one thruster, I still had 11 left, so the massive-redundancy approach worked. I never lost functionality. All lights and cameras worked. Sonar was balky… that’s going to need some work.

>Bottom time close to 5 hours, range of exploration about 1.5 km horizontal, and about 300m vertical along the trench wall, which was like the Grand Canyon, vertical faces interspersed with angled scree slopes. Dramatic terrain.

>The ponded sediment in the center of the trench was the finest I’ve ever seen. When the thrust-wash just barely kissed it, it formed silken veils undulating across the bottom, and then it would rise and hang in tendrils like ectoplasm. Not at all like the typical turbidite plains of abyssal depths. Where I dove the basin of ponded sediment was 1.5 km across, flat as a billiard table, and virtually featureless. It actually ended at a well-defined “beach” where the normal rocks and sediment commenced, terracing upward to the fault scarps. I explored up the scarps onto a plateau.

>The small exposed rock faces had large communities of white anemones about 1 foot long. Hanging gardens. It was a completely distinct micro-habitat from the flat basin.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446482]

>Out on the plain the dominant fauna were 1′ diameter jellies that would lie on the bottom or swim about 2 meters up. When disturbed they would fly off the bottom. There also were large numbers of amphipods in all sizes. The baited lander captured images of incredible aggregations, including individuals close to a foot long. I tried but was unable to rendezvous with the lander because the sonar was not cooperating. Normally the lander is a very bright target, and it should have been easy to find on that flat plan. But without sonar, nor accurate coordinates from the surface, it was a visual search, which is very limited. It might have been 50 meters to my left and I went right by it. I could have done an expanding-square search pattern, but I decided it wasn’t the best use of my power, when there was real exploring to do.

>Actual deepest depth for the dive was 26,791′ (8221m). Initial descent speed was 4.5 knots, attenuating near the bottom to about 1.5 kt, before I trimmed neutral with a few small shot dumps totalling about 50lbs. I drove the final 100m down on thrust, very slowly (because I didn’t trust my altimeter yet… we’d just met and were only dating)… and parked on the bottom using about 10% downthrust.

>Ascent speed was 5.7 knots slowing in the upper water column to 4.8. The soft ballast system functioned perfectly, giving the sub an additional 400kg of lift. The bag pops out automatically at about 200m depth and inflates slowly after the sub reaches the surface. It is an oil-over-gas system of our own design, which uses a spring-loaded poppet valve to open a bottle of nitrogen at 3500 psi when the external pressure balances on descent. The valve locks open, charging the bag, and a reservoir of silicon oil fills the tank so it doesn’t implode at depth. On ascent, the gas boils out of the silicon, filling the float bag in about 3 minutes after surfacing.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446484]

Surfacing at 4.8 knots is dramatic. I point the boom camera and the 1000w spotlight straight up. I can see the surface shimmering from about 100′ down. There’s a real sense of “ground rush” as the shimmering patch grows rapidly bigger, filling the “sky” above the sub. Then BWOOSH! an explosion of foam and bubbles, and the sub pogos back down about 5m, then rises again and comes to rest. I call it “Splash-up”… bastardizing a term from the 60′s space missions.

The only significant problem on the dive is that one of the six battery buses failed without adequate warning as I was making preparations to ascend. Some fault in the battery management system comms inside an external PBOF multi-bus box, probably related to water ingress, but I haven’t gotten a report yet from the electronics guys.

Unfortunately the failure took out the A-comms system, which was on that particular bus, so I lost comms completely. Fortunately the back-up modem, which is powered with its own independent battery, kept transmitting, so they knew I was coming up when the depth numbers started changing. They cleared back about a klick from my last known position and waited. I surfaced about 1500m from the ship, but plainly visible. That’s why I personally like night recoveries. The sub has so many lights and strobes it’s like a UFO mothership, visible to the horizon at night, from the bridge wing of a ship the size of Mermaid Sapphire.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446499]

>Surfacing at 4.8 knots is dramatic. I point the boom camera and the 1000w spotlight straight up. I can see the surface shimmering from about 100′ down. There’s a real sense of “ground rush” as the shimmering patch grows rapidly bigger, filling the “sky” above the sub. Then BWOOSH! an explosion of foam and bubbles, and the sub pogos back down about 5m, then rises again and comes to rest. I call it “Splash-up”… bastardizing a term from the 60′s space missions.

>The only significant problem on the dive is that one of the six battery buses failed without adequate warning as I was making preparations to ascend. Some fault in the battery management system comms inside an external PBOF multi-bus box, probably related to water ingress, but I haven’t gotten a report yet from the electronics guys.

>Unfortunately the failure took out the A-comms system, which was on that particular bus, so I lost comms completely. Fortunately the back-up modem, which is powered with its own independent battery, kept transmitting, so they knew I was coming up when the depth numbers started changing. They cleared back about a klick from my last known position and waited. I surfaced about 1500m from the ship, but plainly visible. That’s why I personally like night recoveries. The sub has so many lights and strobes it’s like a UFO mothership, visible to the horizon at night, from the bridge wing of a ship the size of Mermaid Sapphire.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446504]

>Sitting down there at 27000′, alone in the dark, with no comms, no contact whatsoever with the world so far above, and nothing but the ingenuity of the engineering to get me back… it’s simultaneously scary and exhilarating. It’s the precipice we put ourselves on by choice, to test ourselves and our machines. I configured the cameras to get a good shot of the weights coming off and hitting the seafloor in 3D, but I can’t say I spent an undue amount of time on the lighting. I wanted to see those babies jettisoned as quick as possible. It’s a good feeling when 350kg comes off, with the characteristic “SHOONK” as the weight carriages run down the slide-rails.

>Then I pulled the breaker on the shot-hopper magnet, and let the other 150kg of shot pour out, watching on the boom camera as it spiraled down into darkness in the trailing vortices under the sub. Then I just powered down everything I didn’t need and sat hunched in the dark, waiting… watching the numbers on the depth indicator count down toward the surface.

>It was an interesting ascent. Virtually silent except for the soft whir of the scrubber fan, and the rustle of water vortexing down across the fairing at 5 knots. There was a slight rhythmic rock to the sub, due to vortex-shedding, which I normally didn’t notice because I’m usually too busy doing things… comms, photography etc. But in this low power contingency, I was just sitting there in the dark listening and feeling the sub. It was fascinating to imagine 8 kilometers of water speeding by vertically. I imagined the pressure coming off slowly as the ocean loosened its iron fisted grip.

>You’d have loved it.

>More to come…

>See you in Guam.

>JC

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446511]

>His attempt is also dangerous. Two people once died in a submersible. Last month, Mr. Cameron lost two members of his team in a fatal helicopter crash.

>He built his miniature submarine secretly in Australia, and already it has outdone all other watercraft in its ability to ferry people through the deep’s crushing pressures. As with the birth of the private space rocket industry, where commercial companies are building ships to take astronauts aloft, the debut of Mr. Cameron’s submarine signals the rising importance of entrepreneurs in the global race to advance science and technology.

>His goal with his next dive is to tackle a much older record. A half century ago, in a technical feat never equaled, the United States Navy sent two men down nearly seven miles into the Challenger Deep, their vehicle 60 feet long. A window cracked on the way down. The landing stirred up so much ooze that the divers could see little through the portholes, took no pictures and began their ascent after just 20 minutes on the seabed.

>Mr. Cameron’s bid is to be unveiled Thursday in Washington by the National Geographic Society, where he holds the title of Explorer-in-Residence. Both the society, which is helping pay for the expedition, and Mr. Cameron took pains to characterize the effort as purely scientific rather than competitive.

>It comes as a number of wealthy men — including Richard Branson of the Virgin empire and the Internet guru Eric E. Schmidt — are building or financing miniature submarines meant to transport them, their friends and scientists into the remotest parts of the world’s oceans, including the Challenger Deep.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446508]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/science/earth/james-cameron-prepares-to-dive-into-mariana-trench.h
tml

>As a boy, he used to squeeze his body into drainage pipes, snaking along to see how far he could go.

>As an adult, he made the two top-grossing movies of all time, “Avatar” and “Titanic.”

>And on Wednesday, James Cameron folded his 6-foot-2-inch frame into a 43-inch-wide capsule and plummeted, alone, down five miles in the New Britain Trench off Papua New Guinea. His feat, in a 24-foot-long craft dubbed the Deepsea Challenger, broke by a mile the world depth record for modern vehicles that a Japanese submersible had held.

>But he wants to go deeper: This month, Mr. Cameron plans to plunge nearly seven miles to the planet’s most inaccessible spot: the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific, an alien world thought to swarm with bizarre eels and worms, fish and crustaceans. He wants to spend six hours among them, filming the creatures and sucking up samples with a slurp gun.

>“It’s a blast,” Mr. Cameron said in an interview during sea trials of his new craft. “There’s nothing more fun than getting bolted into this and seeing things that human beings have never seen before. Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff.”

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446515]

>Mr. Cameron will collect samples for research in biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics. “The science is paramount,” Ellen Stanley, a National Geographic spokeswoman, said in an interview. “We’re out to learn what’s down there.”

>Mr. Cameron called his venture “very different from going down and planting a flag” — a seeming reference to how Russian explorers in 2007 put a flag on the seabed under the North Pole. Their deed was meant to strengthen Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed.

>The Challenger Deep is in the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. Over the decades, biologists have glimpsed their unfamiliar inhabitants mainly by lowering dredges on long lines. Up have come thousands of strange-looking worms and sea cucumbers. More recently, robot cameras have spied ghostly fish with sinuous tails.

>Aboard Mr. Cameron’s expedition is Douglas Bartlett, a professor of marine microbial genetics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an arm of the University of California at San Diego. Last year, Dr. Bartlett led a team that dropped cameras into the Mariana Trench and observed giant amoebas — a first in the inhospitable zone. Known as xenophyophores, these mysterious life forms consist of a single cell and appear able to grow to the size of a fist. Scientists find them exclusively in the deep sea.

>National Geographic said the public would be able to follow Mr. Cameron’s expedition at www.deepseachallenge.com. It described the project’s main science collaborator as Scripps, followed by the University of Hawaii, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Guam.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446517]

>The film director has long exhibited a fascination with the deep sea, making “The Abyss” (1989), “Titanic” (1997) and a number of documentaries about lost ships, including “Bismarck” (2002) and “Ghosts of the Abyss” (2003), a 3-D tour of the Titanic’s interior. National Geographic said that Mr. Cameron had now made a total of 76 submersible dives, including 33 to the famous luxury liner.

>The crew capsules of submersibles are made small to better withstand tons of crushing pressure, and thus have no amenities. Mr. Cameron’s solo model is unusually small, its inner diameter less than four feet.

>He said the vehicle over all had many cameras but only one thick porthole, its inner diameter three inches. He described the craft as a “vertical torpedo,” meant to fall and rise quickly so as to maximize time for exploring the seabed.

>“You’d be an idiot not to be apprehensive, but I trust the design,” Mr. Cameron said as he contemplated his impending dive. “You’re going into one of the most unforgiving places on earth.”

>He said the deaths early last month of his two crew members, Mike deGruy and Andrew Wight — both celebrated filmmakers who specialized in carrying viewers into the sea’s depths — initially prompted him to want to scrap the expedition. The two were preparing to film a sea trial of the Deepsea Challenger when their helicopter went down shortly after takeoff from an airstrip south of Sydney, Australia.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446519]

>“It was a horrible day,” Mr. Cameron recalled. “We felt sick at heart. It caused us to question risk and the meaning of life. I personally did not want to continue at that point, but the team rallied.”

>Mr. Cameron said the project, if successful, will result not only in a number of new scientific findings but two documentary films — one a 3-D production for wide-screen theaters, and the other a National Geographic TV special.

>He said that he would take some protein bars with him for the historic dive, but that much of his space was taken up with digital recording decks.

>“It’s full of electronics,” Mr. Cameron said. “It’s tight, like a Mercury space capsule.”

[Anonymous No.4446521]

That's pretty cool.
Nice to see someone in the entertainment business actually doing something worth while with their riches

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446525]

>>4446521
>Nice to see someone in the entertainment business actually doing something worth while with their riches

He's not the only one. It's now up to either 4 or 5 competitors IIRC. Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, US Submarines and Eric Schmidt.

Each with their own cutting edge, next gen submersible, each racing to be the first to send human beings down to the Challenger Deep, cruise ten miles along the bottom, then surface, twice in one week.

If all goes well, Branson wants to start taking tourists down there:

www.virginoceanic.com

[Anonymous No.4446532]

Thank you so much for the update Mad Scientist! Have this!

[Anonymous No.4446580]

Isn't 5 miles already deeper than any scientific sub? Trieste was just a bathyscaphe, like an elevator, it couldn't really maneuver.

It's the dawn of real, non-gimmicky scientific capability to reach the deepest points in the ocean and meaningfully explore them. My body trembles with untold readiness.

[Anonymous No.4446595]

>>4446515
>Last year, Dr. Bartlett led a team that dropped cameras into the Mariana Trench and observed giant amoebas — a first in the inhospitable zone. Known as xenophyophores, these mysterious life forms consist of a single cell and appear able to grow to the size of a fist. Scientists find them exclusively in the deep sea.

If it's that big, it cannot possibly be single-celled. This has to be bullshit.

[Anonymous No.4446621]

>>4446511

>His attempt is also dangerous. Two people once died in a submersible.

......lol

[Anonymous No.4446626]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q9TYUr-Teo

AWW YEAH NIGGAS IT'S HAPPENING

>>4446621
>......lol

Yeah it doesn't sound like much until you remember that this is what it looks like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkhBPF4yfkI

[Anonymous No.4446638]

>>4446626
Fuck man. Just fuck.

[Anonymous No.4446644]

>>4446595
An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell; it's a common size.

[Anonymous No.4446655]

>>4446644

If you look closely with a microscope it is still just lots of smaller cells though right?

[Anonymous No.4446658]

>>4446595

Believe it bro. This thing is basically just a huge ameoba.

Every time they think we've found the craziest thing in the ocean they find something crazier.

[Anonymous No.4446668]

OH SNAP THERE'S A VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mBG0LbAoqk#!

What the fuck is up with that sub design?

[Anonymous No.4446681]

>Dat website

http://deepseachallenge.com/

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4446704]

>>4446668

It orients vertically during descent. And it already passed full 7 mile pressure testing, unmanned.

Cameron is gonna beat Richard Branson.

[Anonymous No.4446715]

>>4446638
>Fuck man. Just fuck.

Yeah, and that could happen. Branson's sub imploded during unmanned testing. They figured out why and fixed it in the next revision but there is serious possibility for some nightmare gory deaths in this contest.

[Anonymous No.4446727]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGWuxFhZDGc

>The new age of exploration has begun

Chills down my spine. ALL THE FEELS.

[Anonymous No.4446828]

>>4446658
how big is the giant amoeba, and is that the same thing as in here: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2374/giant-grape-amoebas-found-rolling-seafloor ?

So it's a single-celled organism that's the size of a grape? How can that be possible, and how big is it's nucleus?

[Anonymous No.4446940]

>>4446474

Let me sum it up for you, asscake:

1. Rich guy does some seabro thing.
2. You seabros read the news and start stroking your gaynipples while cooing with lust.
3. Time passes and the rich guy's effort produces NOTHING. After all, the sea is a very capital-intensive places to do ANYTHING.

Nobody's buying your particular brand of hyperstupidity. Humans won't colonize the sea. It's too expensive and dangerous, and in addition, THERE'S NO FUCKING NEED. We have plenty of land, and on that land, WE JUST BUILD HIGHER FOR MORE FLOOR SPACE.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447083]

>>4446828

This new species is larger than those, roughly the size of an orange.

[Anonymous No.4447136]

>>4447083
so how big is its nucleus then? what about the dna does it have a super long string of dna ?

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447206]

>>4447136

Presumably, structurally it's made of the same proteins and amino acids just a shitload more of them.

[Anonymous No.4447213]

>>4447136
Big cells are multinucleated. You really think your sciatic nerve has a single nucleus, down on your foot, producing proteins to make and use neurotransmitters up on your back?

[Anonymous No.4447232]

I dislike his movies, but I can't hate a guy that bro-tastic.

If I wasn't broke I'd think about mailing him $5. Not that five bucks means shit to him

[Anonymous No.4447244]

>>4447213
so how does that work then, does it have the same dna in all of its nucleuses? What about if there's a virus infection or a mutation and it gets two types of dna?

[Anonymous No.4447247]

>>4447244
>so how does that work then, does it have the same dna in all of its nucleuses?

Yep

>What about if there's a virus infection or a mutation and it gets two types of dna?

Well I guess that set of DNA in that nucleus is going to produce whatever it's going to produce. No different from two nuclei in different cells carrying now-different DNA.

[Anonymous No.4447280]

i have a new level of respect for cameron. didnt really care much for most of his movies, but its good to see that he has respectable hobbies and seems to care a lot about science.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447283]

Dumping photos of Cameron's sub, the Deepsea Challenger.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447286]

He's going to be diving into the Challenger Deep in the next few weeks.

It will all be filmed, inside and outside of the sub, in IMAX 3D using the finest quality cameras anywhere. (Red Epic)

So soon after the dive we'll be able to see the film and feel as if we went with him.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447289]

Deepsea Challenger will enter into use as a research sub after this feat, as will Sylvia Earle's sub. The Triton 36000 and Deep Flight Challenger will both be used to develop followup multipassenger subs intended specifically for deepsea tourism.

[Anonymous No.4447292]

The Triton 36000 doesn't look like it will survive... It's just a bubble made of glass right?

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447303]

>>4447292
>It's just a bubble made of glass right?

Not just any glass. Rayotek borosilicate glass. They are depending on it's unique molecular properties; It locks into an increasingly stronger molecular configuration as the pressure on it increases. Stronger with depth.

Nanoengineered glass is one of the most promising materials for applications like this. It's why all three of the other competing subs have either a dome or a sphere made of glass for their cockpit. Cameron went the safe, tried and true route of a porthole in a titanium sphere. He's likely to beat the rest, but their subs look more impressive froma technical standpoint imo.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447310]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2tm40uMhDI

Another hype video, this one visualizing exactly how far his sub will have to go to reach the bottom.

[Anonymous No.4447311]

babby coder at deepseachallenge wants me to "upgrade" my browser, can't into W3C

[Anonymous No.4447330]

Say, what kind of floatation would they use on a thing like this? I know syntactic foam used not to be good enough - is that still the case? Is it some sort of low-density liquid like the Trieste, but just significantly less owing to the lower hull weight needed?

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4447332]

>>4447330
>Say, what kind of floatation would they use on a thing like this? I know syntactic foam used not to be good enough - is that still the case?

They invented a new formula for a foam they call "iso-foam", now patented, specifically for the task.

[Anonymous No.4447422]

This feels so much like F-Zero.

It's a race. they each have their own unique cartoony futuristic sub, the pilots are (mostly) well known charismatic public figures, etc.

This is gonna be a spectacle. I hope it gets the media coverage it deserves.

[Anonymous No.4449277]

bampff