Word: argos
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...some 600 miles west of the Brittany port of Brest by Robert Ballard, the undersea explorer who in 1986 located the wreck of the passenger liner Titanic. As in the search for the Titanic, Ballard, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, used the unmanned submersible Argo in his Bismarck quest. According to Ballard, the battleship, which lies 15,000 ft. below the surface, is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" -- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and torpedoes were fired into the Bismarck by its Royal Navy attackers. Ballard says...
...Washington last week at a news conference held by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, leader of the expedition that early this month located and photographed the sunken liner Titanic. They were only a few of the 12,000 photos shot at the bottom of the Atlantic by the unmanned submersibles Argo and Angus after they had been lowered 13,000 ft. beneath the waves from their mother ship, the U.S. Navy research vessel Knorr...
During the 90-minute conference, Ballard took his captivated audience on a kind of guided tour of the Titanic, running videotapes shot by the Argo as it was dragged by the Knorr back and forth in a series of passes over the site. The dramatic tapes clearly show the great ship sitting upright, pointing toward the north and covered with a fine layer of silt. The port and starboard anchor chains are wrapped around their capstans, still holding the anchors in place, and in the top deck there is a gaping hole that was once a skylight. Through it, Ballard...
While the Argo was being maneuvered around the Titanic, Ballard revealed, it had a couple of close calls, once hitting the bridge, another time brushing against a smokestack. Despite his initial alarm, neither the Argo nor the Titanic was damaged in these encounters. But in the process, the submersible collected the only artifact so far brought up from the great liner: a smudge of paint scraped from the smokestack. Ballard also disclosed that after "mowing the lawn" with highly advanced technological gear (sweeping his sonar back and forth and checking its soundings with a magnetometer), the expedition had actually located...
...sturdy submersible that photographed the Titanic has a legendary forebear: it was named for the ship sailed by the Greek hero Jason as he searched for the Golden Fleece. And roam the Argo does, skimming just above the ocean floor like a giant sled. Designed to map deep-sea hills and gulleys, the craft can descend to depths of 20,000 ft. and remain underwater indefinitely. Essentially, it is a 16-ft.-long cage fashioned to protect a clutch of strobe lights, side-scanning sonar devices and an array of cameras from marine flotsam. The entire contraption is tied umbilically...