We're exploring. We're going to places that nobody has been to before.
Today we are operating two vehicles, the Seirios camera platform and the Deep Discoverer ROV or remotely operated vehicle.
Alright pilot, you have control, when you're ready, you're free to dive.
These ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, are just fantastic.
They give us eyes on the deep seafloor.
The Deep Discoverer ROV is designed to study environments to 6,000 meters, which is almost four miles deep.
Using a tool like D2 allows us to look at the bigger picture down in the deep ocean.
You can think of the Deep Discoverer ROV as a multi-tool. It's outfitted with a number of different sensors.
We can get the salinity, the temperature, the depth. There's also a dissolved oxygen sensor.
And that means we can really get a good feel for what kind of environment these animals are living in.
This is an always-changing platform.
We work with the scientists to make sure that we're meeting their needs.
These look like the first little pieces of carbonate we're seeing.
Our main capability with this vehicle is our ability to capture high-definition video.
That's a great shot.
The HD camera on D2 has a 20-times optical zoom lens,
meaning that we're able to zoom in on a three-inch creature from 10 feet away and fill the frame with incredibly fine detail.
Having those eyes down in that environment really gives us a great context for the entire area.
It is able to not only do our dirty work, but do the work of scientists ashore.
The video feed comes up, it comes up to us on the ship and then it goes out via the Internet.
Through telepresence, we are able to work together to get a great context for that deep-sea environment we may be exploring.
We have great video. I mean, it's amazing the detail that they can zoom in and we can see on our monitors.
But, in the final analysis, it many cases, we have to have the specimen to look at the microscopic anatomy.
The other kind of data that we get is that we actually do samples, we do collections, geological and biological.
We have a large payload on board D2.
So the ROV Deep Discoverer is one of the most capable scientific ROVs.
It not only has two manipulator arms, but also has a suite of tools which that manipulator arm can work.
The craft manipulator has something called grip force, and that is something that we can adjust on the fly.
We can choose anywhere from grip force 1, which allows us to collect something really, really delicate.
There, you got the whole thing. Brilliant. Amazing.
The other option is that we can go to grip force 9, when you fully repress that button,
you have all 800 pounds of force of those manipulator hands available to you to collect something larger, like a 50 or 60-pound rock.
Anything that we see here is really likely a new species as well, so thank you very, very much for collecting this.
By being able to better understand an ecosystem in its entirety,
that means that we can make better decisions about that area's management as well as its protection in the future.