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Weighing about 550 pounds, the six-foot-long Orpheus drone cost nearly $2 million to build and was named for the Greek poet and prophet. The main goal for this next-generation mini-submarine that was engineered and constructed by WHOI in Massachusetts, will be to increase our knowledge of the deepest areas of our planet’s oceans known as the hadal zone.
This exotic region is represented by radical trenches and troughs as deep as 20,000 to 36,000 feet, replicating challenges and conditions that might pop up while investigating watery environments on other planets and moons. There are quite a few similarities between Earth s deep ocean and space exploration, said JPL roboticist Russell Smith during a May 5 virtual press conference regarding parallels that include data-constrained communication, requiring a lot of autonomy, but also challenging environmental conditions that require a lot of engineering work to deal with.
The new underwater vehicle, called Orpheus, relies on autonomous navigation software developed by NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California for the Mars Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter. The primary task for the mini-submarine, which was built by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, will be to advance humanity s understanding of the deepest regions of the oceans, the so-called hadal zone.
With trenches and troughs as deep as 20,000 to 36,000 feet (6,000 to 11,000 meters), the hadal zone presents similar challenges to those experienced by exploration vehicles on other planets, Russel Smith, a roboticist at JPL, said during an online news conference on May 5.