$7 Million Xprize For Deep Ocean Exploration (businesswire.com) 37
An anonymous reader writes: Peter Diamandis announced today the launch of a new Xprize competition. $7 million is available for teams who are capable of pushing the boundaries of ocean exploration. "Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet's surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security, and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us," Diamandis said. The competition goals are as follows: "In each round, teams will complete a series of tasks, including making a bathymetric map (a map of the sea floor), producing high-resolution images of a specific object, and identifying archeological, biological or geological features. Teams also must show resiliency and durability by proving they can operate their technologies, deployed from the shore or air, at a depth of up to 4,000 meters."
This does make a little more sense (Score:2, Insightful)
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Unless saying "that's a galaxy" is exploring, we've explored a lot less than 5% of the space. 0% of the other oceans in this solar system.
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Space? Space is easy. It's just big.
And hard to get to.
And rather hazardous, what with the radiation from solar storms, the risk of hull breaches from (micro)meteorites, the problem with cooling/heating, the lack of oxygen (or anything to create oxygen from), and so on and so forth.
It's not exactly a walk in the park.
Yes, the pressure difference is just 1 atmosphere rather than then 1 atmosphere/10 meters of the ocean, but on the other hand there's no DNA- and electronics-destroying radiation in the ocean, you're actually inside a very effici
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No, we haven't. We have maps of the sea floor that are more detailed than pretty much anywhere in the solar system. We routinely get samples from the sea floor, while the amount of samples we have from space has been stable at less than 400 kg for almost 50 years now. You can set up a deep sea expedition down to 4000 m for a few million. Going anywhere in space requires 4 orders of magnitude more money.
One DSV (Alvin) has made 4400 dives to 4 km, spending 100x more hours on the bottom than astronauts have s
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Weird (Score:1)
Kongsberg and others already make AUVs that do this. Shell uses them all the time. The only difference is the requirement to deploy them from the shore or the air. I'm not sure really what they are getting at on this one.
This is helping drill for oil (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not about discovering the oceans and what lives there or the geology of the depths. This about helping Shell (the sponsor) create cheaper technogolies such that they can drill for oil. The requirements they have laid out are weak, for example "depth of up to 4,000 meters". The ocean deepest point is almost 11,000 meters. The drilling technology in the future will be reaching 4,000 meters.
I usually envisage Xprizes as advancing the worlds technologies on a shoestring budget in areas that we have limited knowledge, such as sending a rocket to the moon and taking a photo of the surface and beaming it back to Earth.
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You're right. But it's about furthering the technology.
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As someone who's actually w
why only 4000? (Score:1)
Why not just make it full ocean depth, 5000 - 6000m? That gets you to the bottom of most of the world's oceans. Sure the foam costs a bit more but most of your electonics are already going to be oil compensated and pressure rated.
I'll do it for 1 million dollars! (Score:2)
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Any of the criteria cover longevity? What we really need is something that can comb the depths for weeks or months unattended. And bring back video/audio/sonar/etc for that entire time and let scientist thumb through it. Most of our current expeditions into the deep ocean are quick jaunts, I think some of the expeditions down to titanic took a day, and only a couple hours of that was actually at the wreck.
Well there are two problems here.. First is that you cannot take humans with you. It's just not possible to cram in all the necessary life support stuff and batteries to run it all into a pressure hull anybody can afford to build on this budget..... Second, just dumping the data into the hands of people requires that you first get the data to the surface which means you waste time at the surface or you are tethered to a boat that's pulling you around.
I don't think the tethered option is what they are look
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Pop a hole in the hull and compression will no longer be a problem!
Err... I'm kind of sorry but not sorry enough to not hit submit.
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Electromagnetic waves like radio and light don't travel far through ocean water. Not more than a few dozen meters at most. Sound waves travel for hundreds of miles, but the bandwidth is too low for digital communications, though it's good enough for dolphins and whales. So every ROV needs an umbilical cable consisting of shielding, power and data). Given the hazards of pulling these cables along, it's easier to have the ROV release cable like a spider.
Having autonomous ROV's has always been a dream. Making
how about taking high def pics of K129? (Score:3)
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I'd be real surprised if the Navies of a number of countries haven't closely surveyed just about all such interesting sites in international waters. I'd be willing to bet that it's been decades since it was done.
After all, the finding of the Titanic really was just a military funded smoke screen, where the military was interested in a very close survey of some targets of military value and was willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. The "We are looking for the Titanic" was a clever cover story at th
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target of military value in the nowhere middle of the Atlantic Ocean and that is how the Titanic was found? Where do people come up with this
Well documented that Ballard was part of a team to track down a submarine that disappeared in the Atlantic. Not the Threser (early 60s that led to the Sub Safe program of engineering) but another. I don't remember the story but appeared it was sunk by its own torpedo or some other mishap that sunk the boat. Navy put this a high value to find out what happened as the vessel never arrived in port. So they funded a team to meticulously search the vessel using latest technology. They found the vessel. But there