The director behind the awesome Avatar and the not nearly as awesome The Abyss, Cameron is already known for his obsession with the deep seas, and is set to take on another real life underwater adventure in a submarine called Deepsea Challenger. Cameron will descend solo in his submarine to Plunge to the Deepest Part of the Ocean Floor
This infographic helps put things in perspective:
If the mission is successful, and Cameron isn’t smashed to pixie dust by the water pressure, he will become the first person in more than 50 years to make it to the deepest point in the ocean. Cameron has had a successful test mission that took him deeper than any other human has been on a solo mission. The only other two people ever make it to the bottom of Challenger Deep spent only 20 minutes on the seafloor with the view obscured by silt. The bottom of the Challenger Deep is a whopping 36,070 feet down.
Cameron’s craft, on the other hand, is designed to stay on the bottom around six hours, at a record-breaking depth of about 6.8 miles below the surface of the ocean. Being James Cameron, of course, he will bring with him multiple 3-D high-definition cameras and a gigantic eight-foot tall array of LED lights to illuminate the murky gloom at that depth
sos:Cameron prepares for exploration Last edited by dauswq on 4-4-2013 12:23 AM
Diving to the deepest point of the Mariana Trench is something like riding a cramped elevator that starts in a steamy tropical forest and ends in the dead of night at the North Pole.
Cameron’s high-tech single-pilot submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, which was constructed by Cameron and his team of scientists and engineers over the past eight years. Cameron has released little information about the vessel, which was built in Australia.
The director and his team have secretly planned and plotted for five years to send the Deepsea Challenger into the chasm. He has been conducting test dives inside the one-man submersible for several weeks. In a joint scientific project with the National Geographic Society, scientists and engineers have joined Cameron’s team in this deep sea endeavor.
The Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, and has had only two previous human visitors
During one of his final test dives for the mission, the filmmaker descended more than 26,000 feet in the Solomon Sea just south of Papua New Guinea.
Outfitted with special cameras and robotic arms, Deepsea Challenger is able to dive vertically at speeds of 500-700 feet per minute and can withstand immense pressure - up to 16,000 pounds per square inch.
When the submersible hatch closes, the temperature inside rises “like a sauna,” said Cameron, who began his descent in shorts and a t-shirt. Later, he layers up, with the temperatures dropping to freezing the further down he goes.
Being uncomfortable and cramped in a small space for hours is well worth it, he said.
"It’s so exciting - every second you see something cool or you've got something to do or you're photographing or you see some amazing fish,"Cameron told CNN.
The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER is expected to stay on the seafloor for about six hours. While there, Cameron will record video with a series of 3D, high-definition cameras. The perpetually dark area will be illuminated with an 8-foot-tall array of LED lights that has the ability to illuminate up to 100 feet of clear water. Cameron will control both using a hydraulic system. He will also have control of a special robotic arm that will allow him to collect samples for research in biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology, and geophysics.
Small design
There are three main sections to the sub: there’s the beam, which is the single biggest component. Below that is Cameron’s pilot sphere and below that is a section that stores all of the scientific gear.
The sub is one of a kind and took eight years to make. It operates vertically and was purposely designed to be as small as possible so as to better withstand the immense pressure of being underwater that deep (roughly 16,000 pounds per square inch).
In fact, the 6-foot-2-inch Cameron will be operating the sub in an area that has a diameter of less than four feet. Besides snacks and a change of warmer clothing (it will get very cold down there), there are no amenities on board.
Finding the right foam
One of the headaches that the team ran into was finding foam with which to construct the sub. Most materials that they tried either cracked, warped, compressed, lost buoyancy, or otherwise did not display enough tensile strength to operate that deep underwater.
Frustrated, the team decided to create a syntactic foam, which has since been named “ISOFLOAT” and is already patented. It’s made up of millions of hollow glass microspheres, altogether suspended in an epoxy resin. In total, 70% of the sub’s volume is made up of ISOFLOAT.
Ascent/Descent
The ISOFLOAT foam plays a big role in getting Cameron back up to the surface. During the descent, the sub is outfitted with about 1,000 pounds of steel plates. When it’s time for the ascent, Cameron will flip a switch that will turn on an electromagnetic system that abandons the plates, thus allowing the sub to rise to the surface.
Should any issues arise, there are a series of solutions planned out:
• If there’s a power failure, the plates will fall away immediately.
• If plates don’t disengage, the wire connecting them to the sub will corrode after 12 hours.
• Cameron can use a heat-based method to break the bolts within the sub from holding the plates.
• If this doesn’t work, bolts can be broken electromagnetically via signal sent from the above-surface team.
Moving around
While on the seafloor, Cameron will be able to pilot the sub using joysticks that command its 12 propeller-driven thrusters. He will be able to move the sub up and down, side to side, and even hover in place, a system that the team calls “Auto Altitude”.
In terms of speed, Cameron will be able to move at 3 knots, and travel upwards at about 2 knots. The sub is capable of turning on a dime, and the whole system is super-quiet so as to not disturb the local wildlife.
Making the electronics and batteries water and pressure-proof
The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER will rely on three buses of battery power during the dive (though it can operate on just one): that’s enough on-board battery to power two-to-three electric cars.
More specifically, 70 battery packs will be mounted in the sub’s walls, with each one spaced far enough apart from the other so as to not disrupt the foam as it shrinks under the ocean’s pressure (the sub is expected to shrink by about 1%).
Each battery will sit inside a silicon oil-filled, bread-loaf-sized plastic box. A problem that the team ran into is that silicon fluid shrinks under pressure. Their solution was to place a small medical drip bag inside each pack and as the pressure increases, the bag inflates with seawater; as the sub ascends, the seawater is expelled. This allows the packs to be exposed to the high pressure surrounding without affecting the battery. It also allowed the engineers to avoid having to build heavy, pressure-resistant housing for all the batteries, too.
Communication
Cameron will narrate a dive log into two 3D cameras during the expedition. He’ll be in touch with his above-surface crew via a 19-mile under water range, and can communicate with them via text message, too.
Location
There are several locating systems to assist the team with finding the sub after it surfaces:
• An acoustic navigation system allows the ship to track the sub as it surfaces.
• There’s a pair of LED beacon lights on the sub, both of which are visible at night for several miles. They’re powered by a dedicated battery system and can last up to 16 hours.
• A strobe light atop the sub can flash for 30 hours.
• The sub includes two separate GPS beacons in glass, pressure-resistant spheres:
- One uses a satellite system to send the sub’s coordinates to the team’s ship.
- The other uses marine VHF to broadcast the sub’s coordinates at ranges otherwise limited by sight.
• A radio direction finder system is included, too
Between monitoring and controlling the sub, batteries, thrusters, life support, navigation, 3D cameras, robotic arm, LED lights, and more, there are over 180 systems being used for this project.
Expedition hopes
In addition to Cameron’s underwater work, the team will also be dropping unmanned “landers” to the trench bottom before Cameron’s descent. They look kind of like skinny phone booths and are 13-feet tall. Each one’s equipped with cameras and will carry bait in hopes of capturing sea creatures in plastic cylinders, which can then be retrieved by the team later on when they surface.
In addition to learning more about this unexplored part of our planet, the team is hoping that this project will also shed some light on natural disasters and the emergence of life on Earth (some scientists suggest that mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench could have served as incubators for the first life-forms on Earth).
Film
The DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition will be made into a 3D feature film. It will subsequently be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel, and documented in National Geographic magazine.
Cameron plans to also collaborate with National Geographic to create broad-based educational outreach materials pertaining to this expedition.
Additional support
In addition to National Geographic and Rolex, who are together sponsoring the project, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, is the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE Project’s primary science collaborator. Additionally, the team is collaborating with the University of Hawaii, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Guam. Additional funding has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports original research and public understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
One last thing . . .
National Geographic put together a great website that fully explores all of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER’s systems, and provides further information on how this mission came to fruition. Check it out at deepseachallenge.com
WASHINGTON, March 25, 2012 (AFP) - "Titanic" director James Cameron reached the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean in his solo submarine, mission partner the National Geographic said Sunday. James Cameron lowers himself into his sub prior to his historic descent to Challenger Deep.
Photograph by Mark Thiessen, National Geographic
The explorer and filmmaker reached a depth of 35,756 feet (10,898 meters) at 7:52 am Monday local time (2152 GMT Sunday) in the Mariana Trench in his specially designed submersible, according to mission partner National Geographic.
Cameron's first words on reaching the bottom of the so-called Challenger Deep were "All systems OK," according to a mission statement.
He then tweeted: "Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you."
He planned to spend up to six hours on the Pacific Ocean sea floor, collecting samples for scientific research and taking still photographs and moving images.
His goal is to become the first human to visit the ocean's deepest point in more than 50 years, and to bring back data and specimens. He was expected to take 3D images that could help scientists better understand the unexplored part of the earth.
The submersible that Cameron designed, a "vertical torpedo" of sorts, already successfully completed an unpiloted dive on Friday.
The Canadian filmmaker left the tiny Pacific atoll of Ulithi on Saturday for the mission some 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) down in the Pacific Ocean, according to the scientific institution.
He planned to film his journey with several 3-D, high-definition cameras and an eight-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall) array of LED lights.
In 1960, a two-person crew aboard the US Navy submersible Trieste -- the only humans to have reached Challenger Deep -- spent just 20 minutes on the bottom, but their view was obscured by silt stirred up when they landed.
Because of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness and the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing, according to members of the team.
The water pressure at the bottom of the trench is a crushing eight tons per square inch -- or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Pressure increases with depth.
Cameron, 57, has been running several miles a day, practicing yoga to increase his flexibility for the dive in the sub's cramped quarters and studying deep-ocean science, physician Joe MacInnis told National Geographic News.
MacInnis is a member of the DeepSea Challenege project, a partnership with the National Geographic Society and Rolex.
Cameron already has 72 dives under his belt, including 12 to film "Titanic."
The Mariana Trench is located in the western Pacific east of the Philippines and some 124 miles (200 kilometers) east of the Mariana Islands.
The crescent-shaped scar in the Earth's crust measures more than 1,500 miles (2,550 kilometers) long and 43 miles (69 kilometers) wide on average.
dia dh start menyelam ke?
dauswq Post at 28-3-2012 13:25
da dauswg ...hari senin lpas 5:50 waktu tmpatan ..dan smpai ke dasar trdlm jurang dlm masa 20 minit
James Cameron gives two thumbs-up as he emerges from the Deepsea Challenger submersible after his successful solo dive to the deepest-known point on Earth
Post time 16-3-2012 08:04 PM
变色卡
Author
Post time 23-3-2012 05:55 PM
right?
reach bottom of mariana trench
James Cameron lowers himself into his sub prior to his historic descent to Challenger Deep.
