Hey everyone,
Our indomitable glider has finally breached the walls of the detrimental eddies that have been obstructing its path for the past week. As of October 2, Challenger 1 has been at sea for 100 days!
Challenger 1 is now less than 700km from the Azores; Terceira specifically. Off the coast of Terceira, members of our team will give our brave glider an ocular inspection. If all goes well, Challenger 1 will continue sailing Southeast towards the final stretch that is the Canary Islands.
Our little droid has been through quite an exciting week. He has passed through a number of interesting sightseeing points and flown an obstacle course and is now back on his way due south to the island of Terciera.
First, as we navigated the wall of North bound currents towards the end of last week, we then began focusing on our strategy to get around the Lukin-Lebedev seamounts. A seamount is a landmass that juts out of the seafloor for thousands of meters, but does not breach the surface. So it is similar to an island except that it does not reach all the way up to the air. Because these anomalies are in the middle of the vast abyssal plain, large migratory animals will use them as reference points on their excursions. This also can be problematic as our glider, although tough, is no match for a collision with such things as a whale. Thus the presence of these are detrimental to Challenger as if we were encounter any of these, it would mean an untimely end to this courageous mission.
One problem we found in navigating the seamounts was that in the different bathymetric models of the ocean floor, we found a number of different values for heights of the seamounts in our area. As a safe guard to avoid any sort of collision with the raised sea floor, we decided against setting Challenger to dive to any specific depth and to instead turn the Altimeter on. This option basically uses a sonar that way the glider can tell where the sea floor is. Although this technique is useful, it is also quite inefficient battery wise and so upon reaching a safe distance from the sea mounts where we were confident we would not get dragged back due to unfavorable currents or any inertial oscillations from the storms, we turned the altimeter back off and sent Challenger on his way.
Then we began focusing on future plans for the mission. If necessary, we have organized for a Portuguese Naval vessel to be available to do a visual inspection as Challenger arrives at the Azores. We believe that (based on current conditions) Challenger will arrive off the coast of Terciera by the last week in October. As we approach, we will need to keep a vigilant eye on what the currents are doing, where the sea floor is, if/where the shipping traffic is, and where our escape routes are. The last thing we need is for our mission to be ironically ended early as we try and see that there is no significant biological growth that may be a problem later in the mission.
One of the main topics of discussion we have had recently has been changing the parameters of our dives. We have been looking into setting a specific range for Challenger to dive between that is more specific than 0-1000m. The benefits we are looking for is to 1- aim for the most favorable currents in the water column and 2- avoid surface waters when we know of shipping traffic.
Navigational wise, we are planning on flying close to the 26W marker until we reach about 39 N. Then we will hopefully encounter an eastward flow that we can ride parallel to Terciera for the visual inspection and continue past Sao Miguel before turning towards the end zone of the Canary Islands.
Also it is looking that we should not encounter much inertial oscillation this week as we should be largely unaffected by storms for the time being. Both Hurricanes Ophelia and Tropical Storm Philippe look like the may miss us as Challenger is now further south than the Jet Stream is currently reaching.
Finally, Challenger now has some pretty fine scenery to both the left and right as he is now parallel with the eastern shores of Maine and the North West coast of Galicia, Spain.
Great work team! and as always
Force, Wind, Sea & Honor
Oliver Ho, Nilsen Strandskov, & Antonio Ramos