GFOE shows off latest deep-water technology
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.