Monday, October 12, 2009

SCINI

Introduction
What is SCINI?

SCINI stands for Submersible Capable of under Ice Navigation and Imaging. She is an underwater robot specifically built to complete science missions beneath the frozen surface of the ocean in Antarctica.
The remotely operated vehicle SCINI cruises over the seafloor under the ice in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

SCINI is a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which means that a tether to the surface allows the pilot to see what she sees through her camera “eyes” and control where she “swims” with her five thrusters.
A test mission at MBARI in Monterey Bay, California. You can see the lighted camera dome on the left, and thrusters to move SCINI up/down, left/right, and forward/back arrayed down her body.

The pilot uses a joystick that looks suspiciously like a video game controller (because it is one) and views the world on a computer flat screen that shows not only the seafloor around SCINI but also the vehicle status array and engineering diagnostics.
The central screen is the views from the cameras, the screen on the left is the engineering screen, and the screen on the right is the navigation screen.

SCINI finds her way around in the ocean using an integrated South Star navigation system that has been developed in partnership with Desert Star Systems. This wireless array allows us to extend the accuracy of GPS beneath the water where satellite signals cannot penetrate. And, what is SCINI finding her way towards? That is what the scientists decide, and this year SCINI will be diving deeper and in more remote locations, in order to describe Antarctic seafloor communities that have never before been seen by human eyes.
SCINI found this unidentified octocoral species at 190 m depth under the McMurdo Ice Shelf.


Cooperation
Where are we going?

Antarctica! This is the –est continent – the coldest, windiest, highest, driest, and roundest continent.
Looking across a barranca (a canyon in the ice shelf) to the Antarctic continent.

It is also a continent that is not owned by anyone, but is preserved for peaceful research purposes by the international Antarctic Treaty. The Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica is even more unknown than other oceans, because of its remoteness and roughness.
In this south pole view, you can see how large the Southern Ocean is, and that it is continuous around the entire Antarctic continent.

The antarctic is the last unexplored place, where we still do not know and have not even seen 99% of the seafloor. To help us work here, we need dedicated tools and better, faster, and more specialized instruments to let us go where our living bodies would fail and to visualize what our organic eyes can’t perceive.
SCINIs “guts” are electronic, and protected by a waterproof metal housing they allow her to dive to depths beyond scuba divers.

SCINI is one of our tools, mixing new technology with intense creativity, hard work and a little bit of wild imagination. It is the close partnership between science and engineering that is the unique strength of this project. Scientists ask “what” and engineers tell us “how!”
Deploying SCINI through the ice in Antarctica is the big reward after months of planning, computer design, and lab and local field testing.


Science
What are we doing?

People are curious, driven by questions, and scientists are the worst of the lot. Like a bunch of perpetual 2 year olds, we incessantly inquire – “What is around the next corner?” “What happens if I climb this mountain?” “What lives in the deep ocean under the ice in Antarctica?”

This year our goal is to create maps of the seafloor. All real exploration starts with mapping as a first step. Without knowing the lay of the land around you, how do you know where the mountains are, where the rivers go, and in which direction the sun sets? Under water and ice, it is even more difficult to see the mountains, the rivers are invisible to our eyes, and during the Antarctic summer the sun never sets. Because light is absorbed by water more than it is by air, even with SCINI’s lights we can only see a few meters in the blackness below 70 m depth.
In the darkness under the ice, SCINI’s 22 forward pointing and 12 downward pointing LEDs provide enough light to capture high resolution images.

To create an overview, the equivalent of an aerial photograph, we take hundreds of pictures and meld them together on a computer. With these photomosaics we can see if distributions of certain animals are limited to the underwater equivalents of “mountain tops” or “river valleys” or if they are only found on the “sunny side.” Where animals are found tells us some basic information about the ecology of the communities.
The rich sponge community at Cape Evans, outlined by SCINIs protective dome cage. The blue streak overhead is a crack near an iceberg.

In 2008 our science goal was one of discovery, intended to expand our view of Antarctic seafloor communities into deeper depths and under thicker ice. We used SCINI to visually describe ecosystems down to 300 m water depth near Cape Armitage and Cape Evans on Ross Island, and under 70 m of ice near Heald Island and the Koettlitz Glacier.
Surprisingly, even tens of km back under a permanent ice shelf near the Koettlitz Glacier, anemones, sponges, tunicates, bryozoans and brittle stars were abundant.

In 2007, the first year of this project, our science goal was one of searching. We set out to relocate experiments that had been set on the seafloor up to 47 years ago. Initially designed to look at the effects of predation, the “Lost Experiments” now give us a record of how antarctic communities have changed over nearly five decades.
Giant volcano sponges (Anoxycalyx joubini) cover an experimental settling structure.

This decadal perspective is an incomparable ecological gem, and next year we will be returning with the original researchers, Paul Dayton and John Oliver, to rescue and resample this rich antarctic history.


Engineering
How do we do this?

The starting point was to find the easiest way to get into these deep, dark and cold habitats. As scuba divers, we can only go to very shallow depths of less than 40 m.
In an early mission, both scuba divers and SCINI prepare to descend through the same hole.

Manned research submersibles are not allowed to work in Antarctica because of the dangers of ice overhead. Autonomous vehicles are useful for preprogrammed surveys, but are not adaptive and responsive to new finds. A remotely operated vehicle like SCINI balances nicely in the middle – it can go deep, it does not risk lives, and it is responsive in real time. It does have limitations on tether length, but this also keeps it from becoming lost in case of a catastrophic failure!
SCINIs tether is flaked out on the ice just after recovery.

The guiding principles of our engineering efforts are reliability, flexibility, and economy. Our time in Antarctica is limited to a few months during the summer. It is too easy for that time to slip away in fixing broken hardware instead of accomplishing significant new progress, so everything has to be tested, and retested, until component failure is a rare thing indeed. Minimizing down time is critical. Especially in a developmental effort, our strict adherence to this principle is unusual. We are very proud of running 44 consecutive missions, with a total seafloor time of 144 hours, without a single failure during our 2008 season.
Engineers work to trouble shoot a problem in the field.

When we are in Antarctica, we cannot just run to the store to replace a part. We are our own spare parts catalogue and supply. We bring spares with us, but we also make every effort to make components swappable. This means that we try to use the same resistors in everything, instead of a unique resistor in each location. We extend this concept to everything from individual components up to boards, so that we not only have to kit ourselves with fewer kinds of spares, but in desperate situations — which happen with disturbing regularity in Antarctica — we can scavenge from a non-critical system to get a critical system running.

We also make every effort to be economical. We try to use commercial off the shelf components that are industry standards and are therefore readily available and reasonably priced. As we are also using cutting edge technology, this can be a struggle when standards are still developing! We take shameless advantage of the extensive testing done by commercial companies to select the sturdiest, most dependable elements, at the best prices. We could not do this if we were designing and building one-off unique parts from the ground up. But, why reinvent the wheel? Instead we use existing motor, power, and electronic components, merged together in a specialized ROV that is accessible to all!
A team of 3 – pilot, scientist and engineer - are all it takes to run a SCINI mission.

Education
Why do we care?

Let’s face it, we are addicts. No one spends every snowboard season in Antarctica, where the surfaces make east coast ice look like champagne powder, unless they cannot help themselves. And like any fanatic, we are out to convert others. So watch it…it starts with a simple joystick, and before you know it, you have robots crawling out of closets and investigating new planets. We enjoy the enthusiasm generated by new explorers, and we learn from them too.
The Second Opportunity for Students program at Cabrillo College in Watsonville, CA created flags for each country signatory to the Antarctic Treaty with wishes for improvements to major societal challenges. The flags flew in the katabatic winds over Antarctica.

As a society, we have done a good job over the last few years in showing what science can accomplish and in demonstrating the wide diversity of things that scientists do. The plethora of web sites available to bring science into the classroom is testament to this. And many of us now know that we each have scientific interests, or inclinations, or at the very least, know to ask questions, which is what scientists do. Our next goal as a society should be to uncover and demonstrate the engineer in all of us.
Students and teachers in the Southeastern Cooperative Educational Programs work on building an Antarctic ROV.

Who did not take the flashlight apart (and likely fail to put it back together), resculpt the garden to divert the water and save the “town” (or destroy it), or use duct tape and paper clips to make beautiful jewelry that was so appreciated by our parental units? Engineers do all this – they figure out how things work, they fix stuff, and they invent new uses for existing bits and pieces.
Existing technology lets us make small holes in the ice easily, and SCINI engineers invented a small ROV to take advantage of this.

With the challenges that are now facing our planet and our species, we need to use the collective power of all of our skills to find solutions to the problems. We have learned to question and to have confidence in our ability to draw conclusions from observations – to believe in our abilities to be scientists. Today, we need to know that we can repair what is broken, that we can create solutions. With all of humanity believing in our own abilities, we can overcome the global issues that we confront now, through our individual efforts as well as our cooperation.
Waterproofing LEDs by potting them in a mix of transparent and heat conducting compounds allowed us to use high intensity, low power lighting solutions.

Thank You!

The SCINI team is very grateful to the many people who have donated their time, expertise, and financial support towards the success of this project.
Many thanks for the support.

Jim Oakden and John Oliver, Benthic Lab stalwarts, for ongoing inspiration, encouragement, and wonderful shoulders to cry or stand on.

DJ Osborne and Jon Erickson, MBARIites who generously shared their experience and provided very helpful guidance, as well as Kim Reisenbichler and Mike Kelly for test/training tank use.

Kent Hammerstrom, retired software engineer and dad, for creating our laser ranging software despite pesky missing dlls.

Alexandria Gallizioli, Ben Kaiser, and Jessica Madden, summer interns, for cheerful web page construction, driving, packing, and a plethora of other very diverse tasks.

Jason Smith for lending us his oscilloscope (yet again) and Lara Ferry Graham for the use of her shark tank as an ROV test tank.

Steve Dunbar and ARS for their much appreciated donation to our work.

Erica McPhee-Shaw for training such excellent physical oceanographers/engineers, and allowing us to hire them almost before they defend their theses.

Last but certainly not least, Rob Robbins, Ken Kloppenberg, Patrick Fitzgerald, Kevin Rigarlsford, John Harter, Aaron Seaman, and all of the support staff in the USAP who help us accomplish the seemingly impossible.
USAP support staff, always willing to lend a helping hand.

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