Last night I met a couple of Hercules AC-130 "Spectre" gunship pilots in the Royal Air Force at Jesters. Proud to say they are envious of how the American public supports our troops, even if they don't agree with the deployment. Unfortunately, these guys said that British citizens don't give a damn what happens to their military men, and "the whole lot of them can be bombed." Something else that was disappointing-- they said they don't like to fly with American pilots, because they don't always know what they're doing.
Today I had my first SOES 3029: Seafloor Exploration/Surveying lecture. We got a tour of the NOC's warehouse for their submersibles, which was awesome.
The Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument (TOBI, below) is the world's highest-resolution Side Scanning Sonar that is towed behind the boat at up to 6000m below the surface (so it's built like a tank to withstand the pressure). They tow it behind the boat at a great depth so that there is not too much signal absorption for the high frequency (30kHz) required for such good resolution. The TOBI can see the sea floor with a 3m resolution. The yellow bar beneath the orange boxes is the sonar array, and has the ability to send the signal 3km in a 2-degree fan, and then detect the echo, which is 1,000,000 times quieter than the source!
The AUTOSUB III (above) is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that can be programmed and deployed, and spend long amounts of time underwater untethered, without a pilot, and unattended, performing various sensing tasks without a mother ship nearby. They have inertial sensors like a cruise missile for navigation. One of them, though, crashed somewhere beneath the Antarctic ice, and hasn't been recovered.
We also got to see one of the NOC's remotely operated vehicles (ROV), which is being taken to the Caribbean to look at the subduction zone near Haiti.
I have a class this afternoon up at the Highfield campus, which I visited for the first time yesterday:
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