Hey All!
Sorry for the gap in the updates but we bogged down a bit by a few nuances called exams. But anyway here is a recap of what our brave little droid has done over the past week.
First off, Challenger 1 has now gone 2,600km in just over 109 days, making its mission the 3rd longest of the Rutgers Fleet!
He also has a great view to his East as by morning, he will be crossing the border from Norther Spain to be parallel with Portugal.
Finally, Challenger is just about 400km from the estimated rendezvous point just north of the island of Terciera where the watersare still close to 1000m deep so that we can continue flying efficiently. Here, an ocular inspection will take place so we can get an idea of how much biology has grown so we can see the effects of consistently diving deep. The ship that will be used is from the Portuguese Navy and a picture is below:
Over the past week, there have been a number of brief way point changes that have occurred. Trying to line the glider up to fly a path where we could pull off getting close to the Azores for the inspection turned out to be the equivalent of threading a needle.
Towards the end of last week (oct 8th), we had been flying into a bit of a head current that cut our speed down a bit. To get out of this, we gradually moved our way point three times to try and get around to more advantageous waters
Although it was slow moving and a bit boring to try and fight these currents, our models produced some really great looking imagery for our road maps. Below find the map of Sea Surface Temperature from ULPGC
As the weekend continued, by the 9th, the currents had shifted from going North, to North West, West and finally to our south west. When we saw the currents follow this oscillation, we decided to move the way point from our east back to the west to try and take advantage of these currents.
With the movement of the way point, we began seeing good progress yet again, however the currents began shifting back up to the north again. To avoid these, we decided to incorporate our new flight protocol of flying below these pesky currents. We flew 3 segments with our inflection depth set to keep Challenger between the depths of 200m-1000m until it is time to surface.
Another change made by Lauren was to the minimum allowable speed. She pointed out that there is some sort of temperature anomaly about about 900m where we see the temperature increase back to about 9˚C. The change in speed will prevent the glider from trying to make any unneeded changes to accommodate the change in density onset by the increase in temperature (the temperature shift can be seen on the last plot in the figure below).
After making these changes, we continued to make good progress as we now follow our way point and the currents a little back to the west.
We have also returned out inflection point closer to the surface, but not all the way there..
After seeing these images (each dot represents a ship of some sort), our hearts started pounding a bit harder. As we have discovered in the past, gliders do not fair well against ships, and it looks like we have gotten pretty close now to areas that have pretty frequent shipping traffic that we will have to dodge on our way to our rendezvous point. So we have left the inflection depth at 25m hoping that will keep us safe from any detrimental surface currents or collisions with ships.
That is all for now and we will have more updates soon!
Oliver Ho, Antonio Ramos, & Nilsen Strandskov