Hey All
Challenger is continuing to make good progress as she flies west towards the sunny shores of Brazil.
Now more than half way to the edge of the exclusive economic zone, she continues to fly at incredible speeds of just under 30 km/day!
This is an immense increase compared to on the previous mission where we were flying much closer to low 20 km/day into the high teens and at some points even below 10km/day!
While on the island, Scott came in contact with a group of researchers that have studied the migration pattern of Sea Turtles that frequent a path from Ascension to Brazil. The team was generous enough to share a number of files with us that included gps tracks of the turtles movements.
Based off of this new map I was able to create with the google earth tool box in matlab, we plan to continue our flight due west for the time being. We will then move the way point south west where we see that gap in the green line. In this region, there is a gap in the sea mounts that are scattered through this area that we will utilize in order to make southern progress towards Sau Paulo.
Although many of these sea mounts do not appear to reach high enough up to pose a physical barrier to Challenger’s progress, we want to avoid these areas just in case the magnetic properties of the rock are to blame for the issues we had in our previous mission.
Force Wind Sea & Honor