The Day

GFOE shows off latest deep-water technology

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Since its inception, the foundation has played a major role in finding the wreck of the only known whaling ship sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, and discovered and explored historic shipwrecks along North Carolina's Outer Banks.

GFOE, whose offices are at Mystic Seaport Museum, has also been involved in a multiyear search for the Bonhomme Richard, John Paul Jones' legendary Revolution­ary War ship that sank off the coast of Scotland.

“I think we’re pretty close,” said GFOE vice president Melissa Ryan.

She said the foundation is in the process of planning an expedition with the French Navy in June to further investigat­e a target the team previously identified in the North Sea.

“There’s all indication­s of an old wooden sailing ship that’s been mostly buried on the bottom, which is what we would expect of a ship that sank in 1779,” she said. “This is the most promising shipwreck we’ve seen in 14 expedition­s and covering 700 square miles.”

The Yogi and the Guru, two of GFOE’s vehicles, capable of diving to 1,500 meters, were used to explore the depths of Yellowston­e Lake in Yellowston­e National Park, which contains one of the earth’s largest calderas, a depression formed when a volcano collapses in on itself.

“A very large portion of Yellowston­e Lake is in the caldera, and as a result, at the bottom of the lake there are a lot of hot springs that come out of lake, and those have some very interestin­g chemical and biological characteri­stics that are really interestin­g and potentiall­y important to science,” said Lovalvo.

GFOE also operates and maintains two vehicles it built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheri­c Administra­tion: the Deep Discoverer and the Seirios.

Engineered to withstand the immense pressure found deep in the oceans, the ROVs are capable of diving approximat­ely 3.7 miles into the oceans and have made significan­t contributi­ons to scientific and technologi­cal advances.

The foundation does not restrict access to any of the data it collects, and, in fact, livestream­s many of its missions before turning over the data it collects to the National Archives. Scientists and experts in diverse fields can inform the foundation’s underwater research in real time during expedition­s.

“Immediate feedback has enormous value,” said Levi Unema, an electrical engineer. He said that during expedition­s, which can last up to eight hours, scientists can remotely see exactly what the team sees during a dive and make requests for more extensive video and photograph­s or taking samples of what they have seen.

The technology involved in both the worldwide informatio­n exchange and the remote operation is essential to the missions.

One problem deep-water ROVs face is communicat­ion between the operator on the surface and the vehicle. Latency, or the delay between sending and receiving informatio­n, can be disastrous, and a split second can mean the difference between crashing the vehicle into a shipwreck or field of boulders and avoiding it.

“The latency is critical, so we’ve been working on developing less and less latency,” said Lovalvo.

In its quest to increase speeds, GFOE has developed telepresen­ce technology that allows a pilot at its Rhode Island facility to operate an underwater vehicle anywhere in the world with only a half-second delay, even though the signals must travel 44,000 miles from the ROV, up to a satellite, down to Rhode Island and back.

Roland Brian, a video, satellite and telepresen­ce engineer, said that by switching to the use of Starlink satellites, which orbit far closer to Earth than the satellites currently used, they can cut the delay down to 40 millisecon­ds.

“It’s allowed us to basically drive these vehicles from wherever we are — from shore — wherever the robots are in the world as long as we have a good internet connection,” Lovalvo said.

 ?? CARRIE CZERWINSKI/THE DAY ?? Marine engineer Todd Gregory, left, and electrical engineer Levi Unema answer questions about deep-water remotely operated vehicle Deep Discovery’s capabiliti­es and constructi­on at the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploratio­n’s open house Thursday in Quonset Point, R.I.
CARRIE CZERWINSKI/THE DAY Marine engineer Todd Gregory, left, and electrical engineer Levi Unema answer questions about deep-water remotely operated vehicle Deep Discovery’s capabiliti­es and constructi­on at the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploratio­n’s open house Thursday in Quonset Point, R.I.

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