Don Atwood's List: Underwater Exploration

Alvin (DSV-2) is a 16-ton, manned deep-ocean research submersible owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The craft was built by General Mills' Electronics Group[1] in the same factory used to manufacture breakfast cereal-producing machinery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Named to honor the prime mover and creative inspiration for the vehicle, Allyn Vine, Alvin was commissioned on 5 June 1964.

The submersible is launched from the deep submergence support vessel Atlantis, which is also owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by WHOI. The submersible has taken 12,000 people on over 4,000 dives to observe the lifeforms that must cope with super-pressures and move about in total darkness. It is said that research conducted by Alvin has been featured in nearly 2,000 scientific papers.

Alvin was designed as a replacement for bathyscaphes and other less maneuverable oceanographic vehicles. Its more nimble design was made possible in part by the development of syntactic foam, which is buoyant and yet strong enough to serve as a structural material at great depths. The three-person vessel allows for two scientists and one pilot to dive for up to nine hours at 4500 meters (15,000 ft). The submersible features two robotic arms and can be fitted with mission-specific sampling and experimental gear. The hatch of the vessel is 0.6 meters (two feet) thick[citation needed], and held in place by the pressure of the water above it (it is tapered, narrower inward).
Alvin in 1978, a year after first exploring hydrothermal vents.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
o 1.1 Early career
o 1.2 Sinking
o 1.3 Post-sinking career
o 1.4 Black smokers
o 1.5 Exploration of RMS Titanic
o 1.6 Recent overhauls
o 1.7 Current work
o 1.8 A possible replacement
* 2 Operation
* 3 See also
o 3.1 Alvin class DSV
o 3.2 Other deep submergence vehicles
* 4 References

WHOI operates the U.S. Navy-owned Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin for the national oceanographic community. Built in 1964 as one of the world’s first deep-ocean submersibles, Alvin has made more than 4,400 dives. It can reach nearly 63 percent of the global ocean floor.

The sub's most famous exploits include locating a lost hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean Sea in 1966, exploring the first known hydrothermal vent sites in the 1970s, and surveying the wreck of RMS Titanic in 1986.

Alvin carries two scientists and a pilot as deep as 4,500 meters (about three miles) and each dive lasts six to ten hours. Using six reversible thrusters, Alvin can hover, maneuver in rugged topography, or rest on the sea floor. Diving and surfacing is done by simple gravity and buoyancy—water ballast and expendable steel weights sink the sub, and that extra weight is dropped when the researchers need to rise back up to the surface.

The sub is equipped with still and video cameras, and scientists can also view the environment through three 30-centimeter (12-inch) viewports. Because there is no light in the deep, the submersible must carry quartz iodide and metal halide lights to illuminate the seafloor. Alvin has two robotic arms that can manipulate instruments, and its basket can carry up to 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of tools and seafloor samples.

Though it is the world’s oldest research submersible, Alvin remains state-of-the-art due to numerous reconstructions made over the years. (For instance, a new robotic arm was installed in 2006.) The sub is completely disassembled every three to five years so engineers can inspect every last bolt, filter, pump, valve, circuit, tube, wire, light, and battery—all of which have been replaced at least once in the sub’s lifetime.

The sub is named for Allyn Vine, a WHOI engineer and geophysicist who helped pioneer deep submergence research and technology.


Interactive Alvin Tour
Alvin Interactive Interactive Alvin
The deep diving submersible Alvin helped to turn a sunless, freezing marine wo

The Trieste was a Swiss-designed deep-diving research bathyscaphe ("deep boat") with a crew of two, which reached a record-breaking depth of about 10,900 metres (35,761 ft), in the deepest part of any ocean on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, in January 1960.
Contents
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* 1 Design
* 2 The Mariana Trench dives
* 3 Other deep dives by Trieste
* 4 See also
* 5 Notes
* 6 References
* 7 External links

[edit] Design

The Trieste was designed by the Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard and built in Italy. Her pressure sphere, composed of two sections, was built by the company Acciaierie Terni, and the upper part was manufactured by the company Cantieri Riuniti dell' Adriatico, in the free city of Trieste on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia; hence that name was chosen for the bathyscaphe. The installation of the pressure sphere was done in the Cantiere navale di Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples. The Trieste was launched on 26 August 1953 in the Mediterranean Sea near the Isle of Capri. The design was based on previous experience with the bathyscaphe FNRS-2, also designed by the Piccards. (It was built in Belgium and operated by the French Navy). After several years of operation in the Mediterranean Sea, the Trieste was purchased by the United States Navy in 1958 for $250,000.

The Trieste consisted of a float chamber filled with gasoline for buoyancy, with a separate pressure sphere. This configuration (dubbed a bathyscaphe by the Piccards), allowed for a free dive, rather than the previous bathysphere designs in which a sphere was lowered to depth and raised from a ship by cable.

At the time of Project Nekton, the Trieste was over 15 m (50 ft) long. The majority of this was a series of floats filled with 85,000 liters (22,500 gallons) of gasoline, and water ballast tanks were included at either end of the vessel, as well as releasable iron ballast in two conical hoppers along the bottom, fore and aft of the crew sphere. The crew occupied the 2.16 m (6.5 ft) pre

A small submarine, the bathyscape Trieste, made it to the deepest point in the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, a few hundred miles east of the Philippines, 10,916 meters (35,813 ft) below sea level. So clearly a submarine can make it as deep as it's even theoretically possible to go. The water pressure at this depth is over 1000 atmospheres. Life does exist here, as well as a carpet of diatomaceous material that covers all the ocean floors of the world. As the Trieste has long been dismantled, there currently exists no manned or unmanned craft capable of making it to this depth.

Trieste was manned by two people and funded by the United States Navy. The pressure sphere used was 2.16 m (6.5 ft) across, with steel walls 12.7 cm (5 inches) thick, able to withstand 1.25 metric tons per cm² (110 MPa) of pressure. The pressure sphere of Trieste, which weighed 8 metric tons in water, was not neutrally-bouyant because the steel had to be so thick for a 2 m-sized sphere at that depth to withstand the pressure that it would have sunk like a rock on its own. Therefore Trieste's pressure sphere had to be attached to a series of gasoline floats, accompanied by iron pellets for weight. Initially weighing slightly more than water, the craft descended 10.9 km below sea level. At the bottom, the pellets were ejected, and the buoyant gasoline floats carried Trieste back to the top.

This feat has never been replicated. The deepest-diving large, military-style submarine was the Soviet submarine K-278 Komsomolets, with a hull made of titanium, making it very expensive, but able to withstand significantly deeper dives than the best submarines made of high-grade steel, like American nuclear submarines. The Komsomolets was a nuclear powered submarine specially designed to make trips as far down as 1300 meters (4265 feet) below sea level, definitely less than the Trieste, but very significant because the Komsomolets had to "defend" a much larger air bubble against the encroaching pressure of the surrounding ocean.

Co

n January 23, 1960, the Trieste reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench and set a deep-diving record -- 35,810 feet -- that will likely never be bested. No one has even tried. In fact, in the nearly 40 years since, no person has plunged to within 10,000 feet of the record.

The Trieste, designed by Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard, was a bathyscaphe, or "deep boat." Before bathyscaphes, the deepest-diving vessels were bathyspheres -- steel spheres lowered and raised by a cable attached to a mother ship overhead. The Trieste and the bathyscaphes that preceeded it, on the other hand, could descend and ascend on their own.

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh
Nearly four decades after their historic journey, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh recount their experience on the Trieste.
The Trieste was over 50 feet long, and its deck, rails, and conning tower made it look something like a submarine. Most of it, however, consisted of floats filled with gasoline -- 70 tons of it. Gasoline is lighter than water, and so provided buoyancy; air tanks at either end of the ship allowed it to float on the surface before the beginning of the dive. Divers Jacques Piccard (Auguste's son) and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh were confined to a six-foot-diameter, 14-ton spherical steel capsule at the base of the ship.

Piccard and Walsh began their descent by flooding the air tanks with sea water. Some nine tons of steel pellet shot helped them to sink. The gasoline compressed as the depth increased, and the craft became less buoyant -- speeding its descent even more (valves released some of that fuel to slow the ship down). Less than five hours after they left the surface, Piccard and Walsh touched down onto the floor of the very deepest part of the ocean -- where the crushing pressure exceeds 16,000 pounds per square inch (more than a thousand times greater than the pressure at sea level), and where Piccard reported seeing a fish swimming by. The divers then released the steel shot, and began their rise to the

A seaport in northeastern Italy at the head of the Adriatic Sea. The bathyscaph was named for the town in appreciation for the support which its people rendered during the novel submersible's development.



(Bathyscaph: t. 50; 1. 59'6"; b. 11'6"; dr. 18' (f.); cpl. 2)



Trieste—a research bathyscaph—was the development of a concept first studied in 1937 by the Swiss physicist and balloonist, Auguste Piccard. World War II abruptly terminated Piccard's work in Belgium on his deep-sea research submarine—a bathyscaph—and he did not resume it until 1945. Piccard later worked with the French government on the development of such a craft, until invited to come to Trieste, Italy, in 1952, to commence the construction of a new bathyscaph. Scientific and navigational instruments to equip the craft came from Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. There, on the southern shore of the Gulf of Naples, at the Navalmeccanica, a civilian shipyard near Naples, Trieste took shape. In August 1953, the bathyscaph was placed in the water for the first time. On 11 August 1953, Professor Piccard and his son Jacques made the trial dive—to a depth of five fathoms.



Between 1953 and 1956, Trieste conducted many dives in the Mediterranean. In 1955, Dr. Robert Dietz, of the United States Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR), met Professor Piccard in London and discussed the project. During their talks, Piccard invited Dietz to Italy to see the bathyscaph. During his visit the following year, Dietz invited Piccard to the United States to discuss the bathyscaph's future as an American submersible.



A group of American oceanographers and underwater sound specialists visited Castellamare, Italy, the following summer, 1957, and tested and examined Trieste. They eventually recommended that the craft be acquired by the United States government. They thought that the submersible was the ideal craft to participate in Project "Nekton"—an inspection of the deepest point in the world's oceans, the Challenger Deep, off the Marianas.



Thus, in the

USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586), a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered radar picket submarine, was the first vessel to execute a submerged circumnavigation of the Earth, accomplishing this during her shakedown cruise in early 1960 while under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr. She also has the distinction of being the only non-Soviet submarine to be powered by two nuclear reactors.

Triton was the second submarine and the fifth ship of the United States Navy to be named for Triton, a Greek demigod of the sea who was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. At the time of her commissioning in 1959, Triton was the largest, most powerful, and most expensive submarine ever built, costing $109,000,000 which did not include the cost of nuclear fuel and reactors.

After operating for only two years in her designed role of a radar picket submarine, her usefulness was negated by the advent of the Grumman WF-2 Tracer airborne early warning aircraft. She was then converted to an attack submarine in 1962, and became the flagship for the Commander Submarine Forces U.S. Atlantic Fleet (COMSUBLANT) in 1964. She was decommissioned in 1969, becoming the first U.S. nuclear submarine to be taken out of service.

Triton's hull was moored at the St. Julien's Creek Annex of Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia as part of the reserve fleet until 1993, though she was struck from the Naval Vessel Registry in 1986. In 1993, she was towed to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to go through the Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program, with this process initiated effective 1 October 2007.

In May 1956 the Navy laid down what was intended as the first of a series of nuclear-powered radar picket submarines. This was USS Triton (SSRN-586), which at 448 feet long and nearly 6,000 tons surface displacement, emerged as the longest U.S. submarine ever built until the appearance of the USS Ohio (SSBN-726) class in the early 1980s.

Triton was unique among U.S. submarines in carrying a propulsion plant with two nuclear reactors, each an S4G rated at 22,000 horsepower. She was also the last U.S. submarine to have a conning tower inside the sail, twin screws, and an after torpedo room. Like Sailfish and Salmon, she was optimized for high surface speed - with a knife-like bow and ample reserve buoyancy - and reportedly, she exceeded 30 knots on her trials.

USS TRITON ( SSN 586) was designed to be fast enough to operate with a fast carrier task force. One of the largest submarines ever built, Triton is 447 feet long, displaces more than 7700 tons submerged, and carries a crew of approximately 170. Her keel was hid 29 May 1956, she was launched 19 Aug. 1958, and was commissioned 10 Nov. 1959. She has two pressurized water reactors, one for each of her two propellers.

Although like the most recent SSRs, Triton mounted her air-search radar on the sail where it could be stowed within the fairwater for submergence, her newer AN/SPS-26 was scanned electronically in elevation, so no separate height-finding radar was required. With three deck levels beneath the sail, there was ample room for dedicated air-control facilities just below the control room/attack center.

Triton was commissioned in November 1959 with the decorated World War II submarine skipper - and later distinguished naval author - CAPT Edward L. Beach, in command. For Triton's maiden voyage/shakedown cruise, Beach was ordered to attempt the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe, and the ship departed New London on 16 February 1960, not to return until 10 May, 84 days and 41,500 nautical miles later. This unprecedented success brought significa

USS TRITON - the fifth ship in the Navy to bear the name - was in many ways a unique ship. With a length of 447 feet (136.3 meters), she was the longest submarine at that time and she was the Navy's first submarine accommodating three decks in her hull. Her propulsion system included two nuclear reactors which is also unique in US submarine construction.

The TRITON was built and commissioned as a nuclear-powered radar picket submarine (SSRN). Upon the demise of the Navy's radar picket submarine program, TRITON was redesignated SSN 586 on March 1, 1961, and entered the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in June 1962 for conversion to an attack submarine. Conversion was completed in March 1964. For the following 5 years, the TRITON served in her new role but due to the high costs involved in operating the submarine and the fact, that TRITON was not able to carry the latest submarine weapons system, the Navy decided to decommission the TRITON in May 1969. The submarine was subsequently placed in the inactive fleet at Norfolk, Va., where TRITON remained into 1986 when she was stricken from the Navy list. Towed to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Wash., the TRITON is awaiting her turn in the Navy's Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program since then.
General Characteristics: Keel laid: May 29, 1956
Launched: August 19, 1958
Commissioned: November 10, 1959
Decommissioned: May 3, 1969
Builder: Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation, Groton, CT.
Propulsion system: two S4G nuclear reactors
Propellers: two
Length: 447.2 feet (136.3 meters)
Beam: 37 feet (11.3 meters)
Draft: 24 feet (7.3 meters)
Displacement: Surfaced: approx. 5,960 tons Submerged: approx. 7,780 tons
Speed: Surfaced: approx. 27 knots Submerged: approx. +20 knots
Armament: six 533 mm torpedo tubes
Crew: 14 Officers, 156 Enlisted