Echo Voyager, Boeing’s latest unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), can operate autonomously for months at a time thanks to a hybrid rechargeable power system and modular payload bay.
The 51-foot-long vehicle is the latest innovation in Boeing’s UUV family, joining the 32-foot Echo Seeker and the 18-foot Echo Ranger.
Boeing introduced Echo Voyager, its latest unmanned,
undersea vehicle (UUV), which can operate autonomously for months at a
time thanks to a hybrid rechargeable power system and modular payload
bay.
The 51-foot-long vehicle is not only autonomous while underway, but
it can also be launched and recovered without the support ships that
normally assist UUVs.
Echo Voyager is the latest innovation in Boeing’s
UUV family, joining the 32-foot Echo Seeker and the 18-foot Echo Ranger.
“Echo Voyager is a new approach to how unmanned undersea vehicles
will operate and be used in the future,” said Darryl Davis, president,
Boeing Phantom Works.
“Our investments in innovative technologies such
as autonomous systems are helping our customers affordably meet mission
requirements now and in the years to come.”
Echo Voyager is the newest member to join Boeing’s
unmanned undersea vehicle family.
The 51-foot vehicle is designed to
stay underwater for months at a time.
Echo Voyager will begin sea trials off the California coast later
this summer.
Boeing has designed and operated manned and unmanned deep
sea systems since the 1960s.
“Echo Voyager can collect data while at sea, rise to the surface, and
provide information back to users in a near real-time environment,”
said Lance Towers, director, Sea & Land, Boeing Phantom Works.
“Existing UUVs require a surface ship and crew for day-to-day
operations. Echo Voyager eliminates that need and associated costs.”
In 2016 Boeing celebrates 100 years of pioneering aviation
accomplishments and launches its second century as an innovative,
customer-focused aerospace technology and capabilities provider,
community partner and preferred employer.
Through its Defense, Space & Security
unit, Boeing is a global leader in this marketplace and is the world's
largest and most versatile manufacturer of military aircraft.
Headquartered in St. Louis, Defense, Space & Security is a $30
billion business with about 50,000 employees worldwide
When an astronaut aboard the International Space Station trained a
camera on a picturesque view of the northern Mediterranean Sea, the
space flyer instead captured a unique effect created by the reflection
of the moon on the surface of the water.
The astronaut's "moon glint" photo shows the twinkling lights of
coastal Italian towns and islands of the northern Mediterranean obscured
by what looks like dark brushstrokes reminiscent of sweeping clouds.
Sunlight can reflect off the surface of water or snow, and when the
light hits at a certain angle, it creates a glare on the material's
surface.
This glare is something that scientists call "sun glint," and
it happens according to a mathematical concept called the bidirectional
reflectance distribution function (BRDF), according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
It turns out that moonlight can do the same thing.
When light from the
moon reflects off the surface of a large body of water or ice at
particular angles, it also creates a glare (or glint) of light, according to a blog post from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University.
When moonlight reflects from the sea, as it has done in this image, it can reveal complex patterns on the sea surface, NASA said.
These patterns typically come from a combination of different natural
processes and traces left behind by human activities, the agency said.
In this image, for example, it is possible to see wave patterns
trailing behind passing ships in a characteristic V-shaped pattern north
of the island of Elba, NASA said.
A meandering line coming off
Montecristo island is an "island wake," which results from alternating
masses of whirling air that develop on the downwind side of the island.
Dark areas of the sea surface — indicating rougher water, in this case —
can sometimes make islands, such as Montecristo and Pianosa, harder to
see, NASA said.
In contrast, areas protected from wind and turbulence
usually appear brighter because their smoother surfaces act as a better
mirror for moonlight, the agency explained.
The sea surface also
displays numerous tight swirls known as gyres, which show large
water-circulation patterns in the sea, NASA said.
The astronaut's image is made all the more compelling by the sprinkling
of lights from nearby cities, such as Piombino and Punta Alta.
The
cities' golden glow turns this already otherworldly picture of Earth's
Mediterranean Sea at night into something truly magical.
During the first dive of the Okeanos Explorer 2016 Hohonu Moana: Exploring Deep Waters off Hawaii expedition to explore on the northeast side of Necker Island, the Deep Discoverer remotely operated vehicle encountered this octopus, which confused several of our shore based scientists who have never seen anything like it. Upon further review, this ghostlike octopod is almost certainly an undescribed species and may not belong to any yet-described genus.
This tiny octopus, whose body measured about five centimeters across, was spotted swimming along at a depth of 825 meters as we explored Whiting Seamount on April 29, 2015.
A satellite image shows damage at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant In Fukushima Prefecture. The damage was caused by the offshore earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011. Photo credit: Greenpeace
With the help of my colleagues in Japan and around the world, I’ve spent the past five years piecing together the impacts
that radioactive releases from Fukushima have had on the ocean, marine
life, and the people who live on both sides of the Pacific.
In the
process of sharing our insights with scientists and the public, I’ve
become frustrated with both sides of the nuclear power debate for
embracing either overly alarmist or dismissive attitudes toward the
problem.
In addition, I’ve grown concerned over the lack of oversight
for radioactive contamination in U.S. waters.
Cesium-137 in the surface oceans as of 2008 (pre-Fukushima)
In the 1960, immediately after the end of testing on the Pacific atolls, the concentration of radioactive cesium in the Pacific off the coast of Japan was about 50 Becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3) and 10 Bq/m3 off California.
By 2011 immediately before the earthquake and tsunami, that had fallen throughout the Pacific to about 2 Bq/m3 as a result of radioactive decay.
Today, the highest we have seen off the coast of North America is 6 Bq/m3.
Off the coast of Japan after the accident, (aside from the extremely high levels detected at the source of release from the reactors) we recorded a high of 4,500 Bq/m3.
source : whoi.edu
On March 11, 2011, the devastation in Japan after the earthquake and
tsunami provided a stark lesson in nature’s power.
But in the days that
followed, another disaster unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant that continues to underscore how human activities can leave a
discernible imprint on something as large as the Pacific Ocean and on
people and organisms thousands of miles away.
Our Radioactive Ocean: The Impacts of Fukushima on the Pacific
WHOI chemist Ken Buesseler discusses radiation in the ocean and the impacts of Fukushima across the Pacific--from Japan to North America (2014)
Five years later, the story from the Japanese side of the Pacific is
this: Overall, things are under control with the construction of an “ice
wall” to prevent the continued releases of contaminated water into the
ocean, and fishing has resumed in all regions except those within 10
kilometers of the reactors.
However, these milestones obscure the fact
that the Japanese will be wrestling with the cleanup for decades and
will spend trillions of yen in the process.
It also minimizes the
threats posed by millions of gallons of highly contaminated water on the
power plant grounds and the likelihood that storms and other natural
events will continue to mobilize contaminants currently trapped in soils
and ocean sediments near shore.
More than 80 percent of the radioactivity from the damaged reactors
ended up in the Pacific — far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl
or Three Mile Island. Of this, a small fraction is currently on the
seafloor — the rest was swept up by the Kuroshio current, a western
Pacific version of the Gulf Stream, and carried out to sea where it
mixed with (and was diluted by) the vast volume of the North Pacific.
These materials, primarily two isotopes of cesium, only recently began
to appear in the eastern Pacific: In 2015 we detected signs of
radioactive contamination from Fukushima along the coast near British
Columbia and California.
Radioactivity In Our Ocean: Fukushima & Its Impact On The Pacific
As expected, the topic of radiation leaking into the Pacific Ocean and threatening marine life and public safety is receiving a lot of attention.
Our intent with this lecture was to bring forth the most up to date information from American and Canadian scientists that are involved in measuring the levels of radiation so the public can be more informed.
The information collected, analyzed and shared by our speakers was done scientifically.
Levels of Fukushima cesium off the west coast of North America were measured independently by WHOI, Canada Fisheries and Kelp Watch 2015.
They all agree on levels of cesium isotopes in waters along the coast and offshore.
Although just barely discernible by our most sophisticated
instruments, these signs, and the many more signs from samples we’ve
collected on both sides of the Pacific, show that releases have
continued, but that at current rates, it would take 5,000 years to equal
the amount of cesium released in the accident’s first few months.
Despite this, the fact remains that this event is unprecedented in its
total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean.
Nevertheless,
we often struggle to detect signals from Fukushima above the background
radiation that surrounds us every day.
So what’s the middle ground?
First, it is incorrect to say that
Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean
indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site
and, we think, enhanced after storms.
At the same time, it is also wrong
to attribute to Fukushima events like recent die-offs of seal, whale,
and starfish along the West Coast rather than see that they are far more
complex and have been happening for far longer than we’d like to admit.
Recently, I’ve begun to see a much more serious threat to U.S.
waters.
With our nearly 100 reactors, many on the coast or near inland
waterways that drain to the ocean, you might expect a federal agency to
be responsible for supporting research to improve our understanding of
how radioactive contamination originating from one of these sites would
affect our marine resources.
Instead, the response we receive from an
alphabet-soup of federal agencies is that such work “is in the national
interest,” but ultimately “not our job.”
As a result, we have turned to
crowd funding to help us build data along the West Coast to address
immediate public concerns and to keep a watchful eye out to sea.
That is no longer sufficient.
As the EPA runs RadNet, which monitors
radioactivity in the air we breathe, we need an OceanNet to do the same
for our nation’s waters.
We also need to do a better job of educating
the public about radioactivity to lessen the impact of both inflammatory
and dismissive rhetoric.
Fortunately, accidents on the scale of Fukushima are rare, but there
is a great deal more we can and should do to prepare should something
similar happen here.
We can’t simply cast our lot on good fortune.
Instead, we need to do everything we can to fill the knowledge gaps that
have the potential to do great harm in the wake of disaster.
Harmony
of the Seas, the newest addition to Royal Caribbean's award-winning
Oasis Class fleet, under construction at Chantiers de l'Atlantique
shipyard is starting her first sea trials viewable in live on Weather 4D 2.0 mobile app.
