Midnight Warriors
My day today began at 1 am.
I was actually a little late. Andrew and I had agreed to meet in the main lab at 12:30, but I somehow missed my alarm. Thankfully, the AUV deployment that was scheduled to come before our lander deployment was taking longer than expected, so I was still in the clear. We only had a few hours before the lander was supposed to go down, and it was time for final preparations. I could feel the air around me, thick with pensive energy, and the Europe song started playing in my head: "It's the final countdown..."
Our first task was to put the weights on the lander. Just like the mooring I described in an earlier post, the lander is controlled by an acoustic release. We attached weights to it just prior to deployment, and these weights will be later released at the seafloor when we recover the lander. Here's the thing about the weights, though: they're 500 lb each. We had to lift them with the crane because that's the only way to do it and ensure that nobody gets injured. Also, they are attached underneath the lander. Yes, yes, that means we had to lift the lander with the crane and slide the weights underneath it. It was an eight man job: one operating the crane, three holding the lander still with tag lines, and four sliding the weights underneath the legs of the lander. To slide the weights, we crouched close to the deck in a crabwalk position and pushed them with our feet in two-man teams. All of this took place at about 2 am.
After the weights were in place, we attached the lander's 10' mast. The mast has a flag, a radio beacon, and a radar reflector, all of which ensure that we can see and communicate with the lander when it's at the surface. To attach the mast, Andrew and I climbed on top of the lander like a jungle gym, and I held it in place while he tightened the screws. The radar reflector at the top of the mast looks like a mythical orb of power, and the image is made even better by the fact that it's at the top of a tall staff. I call it the Orb of Thor.
The final step before deployment was programming the computers that control data collection at the seafloor. The lander has three benthic chambers, each with its own computer, so we get three replicate measurements during each deployment. We attached each computer to Andrew's laptop in turn and communicated the sampling instructions to it via a fiber optic cable. Unfortunately, one of the computers decided not to communicate with the laptop, so we were unable to program it. We tried disconnecting and reconnecting; we checked the battery; we fiddled with it, and nothing worked. Unfortunately, we had to do this first deployment with only two chambers working, but we can try to repair the third computer for later deployments.
The lander has a lot of parts and pieces, and all of them have to be in good working order in order to collect good data. We have to have respect for our equipment and respect for the environment we're sending it to. With a bit of brute force and lots of attention to detail, it will work!
I was actually a little late. Andrew and I had agreed to meet in the main lab at 12:30, but I somehow missed my alarm. Thankfully, the AUV deployment that was scheduled to come before our lander deployment was taking longer than expected, so I was still in the clear. We only had a few hours before the lander was supposed to go down, and it was time for final preparations. I could feel the air around me, thick with pensive energy, and the Europe song started playing in my head: "It's the final countdown..."
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| One of the lander weights under a leg of the lander. |
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| The Orb of Thor poised high above the Thompson deck. |
The final step before deployment was programming the computers that control data collection at the seafloor. The lander has three benthic chambers, each with its own computer, so we get three replicate measurements during each deployment. We attached each computer to Andrew's laptop in turn and communicated the sampling instructions to it via a fiber optic cable. Unfortunately, one of the computers decided not to communicate with the laptop, so we were unable to program it. We tried disconnecting and reconnecting; we checked the battery; we fiddled with it, and nothing worked. Unfortunately, we had to do this first deployment with only two chambers working, but we can try to repair the third computer for later deployments.
The lander has a lot of parts and pieces, and all of them have to be in good working order in order to collect good data. We have to have respect for our equipment and respect for the environment we're sending it to. With a bit of brute force and lots of attention to detail, it will work!
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