Word: craft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...back. Last March a Japanese robot scouted a tiny section of the bottom of the 1,584-mile-long crevasse and sent back the first real-time video images of deepest-sea life. And in laboratories around the world, engineers are hard at work on an armada of sophisticated craft designed to explore--and in some cases exploit--the one great unconquered place on earth: the bottom...
...desperate need to anticipate future quakes is one reason JAMSTEC built the Shinkai 6500 submersible, which can go deeper than any other piloted craft in the world. On its very first series of missions in 1991, Shinkai found unsuspected deep fissures on the edge of the Pacific plate, which presses in on the island nation from the east. The vessel has also discovered the world's deepest known colony of clams (at a depth of more than 20,000 ft.) and a series of thickly populated hydrothermal vents...
Unlike the French and some Americans, though, the Japanese feel a need to go all the way to the deepest reaches of the ocean. A case in point was Kaiko's dive to the bottopm of the Challenger Deep. JAMSTEC engineers watched anxiously on a video screen, the robotic craft spent 35 min. at a depth of 35,798 ft.--2 ft. shy of Trieste's 1960 record. But during that brief visit, Kaiko saw a sea slug, a worm and a shrimp, proof that even the most inhospitable place on earth is home to a variety of creatures. Next...
Japan's latest success adds fuel to yet another debate about deep-sea exploration. Some scientists insist that remote-controlled, robotic craft are no substitute for having humans on the scene. Says MBARI's Robison: "Whether you're a geologist or a biologist, being able to see with your own eyes is vital. That's a squiffy-sounding rationalization, but it's true." There are other advantages too, he notes. "The human eyes are connected to the best portable computer there is [the brain]. And when things go wrong, a person can often fix them faster, more easily and more...
...with the free-floating AUVS, which can roam the depths without human intervention for months on end. Although they cannot yet provide real-time pictures, they can stay on the bottom as long as a year, patiently accumulating data. Two American AUVS--a government- and university-funded craft called Odyssey and Woods Hole's Autonomous Benthic Explorer--have just completed tests off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Eventually, fleets of these robots could communicate among themselves to provide information in the most efficient way, periodically surfacing to beam their data to researchers on shore...