Now less than a thousand kilometers from the shores of South Africa, Challenger is breaking speed records as she navigates the outer edges of the eddies rounding the Cape of Good Hope
This is one of the most energetic areas of the world’s ocean where eddies spill from the Indian into the Atlantic Ocean and we are really seeing their intensity as they propel 29 at speeds upwards of 35 km/day.
Currently Challenger has entered one of these eddies that will carry her around through the weekend. In the image above we have the breakdown of the eastward velocity (red means flux to the east while blue is to the west). According to the Copernicus model which the glider currents are matching at the moment, the souther edge of this eddy is pushing at about .6m/s or 50 km/day! Through the weekend we will try and keep the glider to the outside as it will be hard to break free if we fall too far into the middle.
As for the status of the glider, we are steering much better now after a deeper investigation was conducted this week. A few weeks back when the glider suffered from an underwater reset, the steering parameters that have been tweaked throughout the mission were reset as well. As time passed the steering was getting worse until this week it was discovered that in the recovery process after the reset, there was an error in the steering parameter by an order of magnitude. After adjusting this error, the glider is once again steering pretty well as seen in the figure below