So you know when you’re sitting by the phone desperately waiting for it to ring? Hours and hours pass by as it gets later into the night and still nothing. Sorry Mom and Dad… I think I finally know what I’ve put you through over the years.
Challenger 1 made it through its first 12 hrs at sea yesterday as it began making its way south. However after its surfacing last night around 7pm local/11pm GMT, we lost communications with it until about 9 this morning. Through my experience with gliders, not making contact for over 14 hrs usually isn’t a good thing. The concerned feeling didn’t improve either after I checked the satellite coverage for the region.
[Back when I was working on the 27 mission, I devised an algorithm to make predictions on whether Scarlet would be able to call in. Using Gpredict (top) I could track the Iridium Satellites that the phone in the tail of a Slocum Glider call in to with. Combining the position of the satellites with the surface conditions of the water collected by the glider (middle) and the wave height forecast from oceanweather.com (bottom), I created a sort of Green, Yellow and Red light prediction method that proved to be pretty consoling when 27 wouldn’t call in on schedule]
Ben and our friends at Teledyne Webb then saved the day when they emailed us this morning explaining that everything with the glider is fine and that the reason for no comms was that the network and modem were down back home thus not able to receive Challenger 1’s call. So the glider then continued on with the way point it had been previously given until its next surfacing time when it called in this morning around 9. After making a few adjustments to try and conserve battery power as best we could, Ben punched in a new way point and set it on its way.
-Nilsen