Hey All,

So last night Silbo hit another mile stone in the Challenger Mission, completing his 10,000 kilometer at sea!

Since June 2011, this brave little droid has been through a lot, flying 3 segments totaling over 500 days at sea and over 10,000 kilometers, all while providing our team valuable data and experiences that in turn are helping us lay the frame work as we build for the inauguration of the full Challenger  Mission in the coming years.

Looking to the figure above, Antonio and his group at the University of Las Palmas has now made an operational version of the our 4-D Pinzon ocean model visualization platform for Silbo and HyCOM for the North Atlantic.  With this tool, we can now see how different a picture there is between models that show what is happening at the surface versus what occurs at depth. Looking to the depths, we can see how below the surface layer, the landscape is much different as the current is moving North- Northeast instead of Northwest as the surface models and drift suggest.

As we stand now, Silbo is roughly 1,600 km from Barbados where we have recently begun to make new contacts.  This leaves Barbados as a good potential end point for Silbo’s mission at which point will be breaching 1 year at sea.

To the South, Challenger is continuing to battle on as she fights towards the new way point to the north.

HyCOM visualized in Pinzon in the figures above and below is proving to be pretty accurate as the currents at depth match up quite well with the depth average currents being recorded by Challenger, both showing an overall flux to the east.  Looking ahead however, it looks like we are on the verge of encountering a large warm eddy to our north west which will at first swing the currents to the northeast, then to the north, and eventually favorable to the north east over the coming week.  This we hope will bring our speed back up well into the  higher 20 kms/ day as we have slowed a bit in this unfavorable current.

As this day comes to an end, Challenger is still 1200 km from St Helena, 2400 km from Ascension, and 4,800 km from Brazil.  Still a long ways away from the finish line, but continue to fly strong.

Force Wind Sea & Honor