Deepsea Challenger (DCV 1) is a 7.3-metre (24 ft) deep-diving submersible designed to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest-known point on Earth. On 26 March 2012, Canadian film director James Cameron piloted the craft to accomplish this goal in the second crewed dive reaching the Challenger Deep. Built in Sydney, Australia, by the research and design company Acheron Project Pty Ltd, Deepsea Challenger includes scientific sampling equipment and high-definition 3-D cameras; it reached the ocean's deepest point after two hours and 36 minutes of descent from the surface.
Development
Deepsea Challenger was built in Australia, in partnership with the National Geographic Society and with support from Rolex, in the Deepsea Challenge program. The construction of the submersible was headed by Australian engineer Ron Allum.
Working in a small engineering workshop in Leichhardt, Sydney, Allum created new materials including a specialized structural syntactic foam called Isofloat, capable of withstanding the huge compressive forces at the 11-kilometre (6.8 mi) depth. The new foam is unique in that it is more homogeneous and possesses greater uniform strength than other commercially available syntactic foam yet, with a specific density of about 0.7, will float in water. The foam is composed of very small hollow glass spheres suspended in an epoxy resin and comprises about 70% of the submarine's volume.
The foam's strength enabled the Deepsea Challenger designers to incorporate thruster motors as part of the infrastructure mounted within the foam but without the aid of a steel skeleton to mount various mechanisms. The foam supersedes gasoline-filled tanks for flotation as used in the historic bathyscaphe Trieste.
Allum also built many innovations, necessary to overcome the limitations of existing products (and presently undergoing development for other deep sea vehicles). These include pressure-balanced oil-filled thrusters; LED lighting arrays; new types of cameras; and fast, reliable penetration communication cables allowing transmissions through the hull of the submersible. Allum gained much of his experience developing the electronic communication used in Cameron's Titanic dives in filming Ghosts of the Abyss, Bismarck and others.
Power systems for the submarine were supplied by lithium batteries that were housed within the foam and can be clearly seen in publicity photographs of the vessel. The lithium battery charging systems were designed by Ron Allum. The submersible contains over 180 onboard systems, including batteries, thrusters, life support, 3D cameras, and LED lighting. These interconnected systems are monitored and controlled by a programmable automation controller (PAC) from Temecula, California-based controls manufacturer Opto 22. During dives, the control system also recorded depth, heading, temperature, pressure, battery status, and other data, and sent it to the support ship at three-minute intervals via an underwater acoustic communication system developed by West Australian company L-3 Nautronix.
The crucial structural elements, such as the backbone and pilot sphere that carried Cameron, were engineered by the Tasmanian company Finite Elements. The design of the interior of the sphere, including fireproofing, condensation management and mounting of control assemblies, was undertaken by Sydney-based industrial design consultancy Design + Industry.
Dives
In late January 2012, to test systems, Cameron spent three hours in the submersible while submerged just below the surface in Australia's Sydney Naval Yard. On 21 February 2012, a test dive intended to reach a depth of over 1,000 m (3,300 ft) was aborted after only an hour because of problems with cameras and life support systems. On 23 February 2012, just off New Britain Island, Cameron successfully took the submersible to the ocean floor at 991 m (3,251 ft), where it made a rendezvous with a yellow remote operated vehicle operated from a ship above. On 28 February 2012, during a seven-hour dive, Cameron spent six hours in the submersible at a depth of 3,700 m (12,100 ft). Power system fluctuations and unforeseen currents presented unexpected challenges.
Challenger Deep
On 18 March 2012, after leaving the testing area in the relatively calm Solomon Sea, the submersible was aboard the surface vessel Mermaid Sapphire, docked in Apra Harbor, Guam, undergoing repairs and upgrades, and waiting for a calm enough ocean to carry out the dive. By 24 March 2012, having left port in Guam days earlier, the submersible was aboard one of two surface vessels that had departed the Ulithi atoll for the Challenger Deep.
On 26 March 2012 it was reported that it had reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Descent, from the beginning of the dive to arrival at the seafloor, took two hours and 37 minutes, almost twice as fast as the descent of Trieste. A Rolex watch, "worn" on the sub's robotic arm, continued to function normally throughout the dive. Not all systems functioned as planned on the dive: bait-carrying landers were not dropped in advance of the dive because the sonar needed to find them on the ocean floor was not working, and hydraulic system problems hampered the use of sampling equipment. Nevertheless, after roughly three hours on the seafloor and a successful ascent, further exploration of the Challenger Deep with the unique sub was planned for later in the Spring of 2012.
Records
On 26 March 2012, Cameron reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. The maximum depth recorded during this record-setting dive was 10,908 metres (35,787 ft). Measured by Cameron, at the moment of touchdown, the depth was 10,898 m (35,756 ft). It was the fourth-ever dive to the Challenger Deep and the second crewed dive (with a maximum recorded depth slightly less than that of Trieste's 1960 dive). It was the first solo dive and the first to spend a significant amount of time (three hours) exploring the bottom.
Mariana Trench | in search of the abyss
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Lol I love that James Cameron's reaction to the billionaire remover device is "I've been to the titanic dozens of times, skill issue"
Looking at the civ wiki and I forgot that they let you play as Stalin and Mao in some of the older games. Modern devs would never.
They also had fascism as a prerequisite to build Mt. Rushmore, which is mega basedThere's Stalin and Lenin mods for Civ 6, they're pretty cool.
I still laugh at how the Civ 5 ideologies were communism, fascism, and freedom
and in Civ 6 they're communism, fascism, and democracy
Isnt there some paradox game with Stalin in it and if you play as him you have to deal with a unique mechanic called "paranoia" or some other brainwormed shit like that?
Ngl though a well made strategy game about different factions of a revolution seems like it could be pretty dope to play.
been today with my extremely normie family (parents, grandparents etc.) and we probably spent a good half hour just howling with laughter over the submarine shit. felt incredibly validating after all the lib handwringing over the poor billionaires lmao
Just read the teen in the sub that imploded didn’t want to go but wanted to make his father happy. Grim.
Eh, he was on his way to becoming just like his dad in all likelihood. Very few people with that family background redeem themselves later in life.
Twisted way of justifying him dying. Someone who is 19 and is going against his fear to make his dad happy doesn’t sound like a bad orson
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In North Korea white men can't jump. If the government catches a white man playing basketball he's executed on the spot
if a man is caught jumping he becomes an enemy of the state and must beat all 8 worlds to confront Kim Jong Un at his evil castle filled with lava
Does the labor theory of value take into account wiggling my mouse every few minutes so that Teams shows me as "online" instead of "away"?
I wish bears weren't so dangerous. They seem like such big fun guys. But they'll fucking kill you, sadly.
Alway discuss to meet somewhere in public first, maybe for a coffee, after you've moved off of grindr
Oh you mean the animal
Ironically big fun guys (who could also maybe kill you) are one of my biggest hang ups on actually meeting a bear
Bear attacks are a terrible way to go. That bear rampage that killed a bunch of students in Japan is pure nightmare fuel.
They do look friend shaped though.
The hell? I never heard about that. I thought they just had black bears in Japan?
I know of at least 2 multi death bear rampages in Japan. They also have a type of brown bear.
This is a particularly infamous one that isn’t the hiking club https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankebetsu_brown_bear_incident
They really aren't that dangerous if you behave yourself, follow the rules, and treat them with respect. They only kill like one tourist every other year, and it's almost always someone who did something silly like go in to the bush alone, or try to approach the bear.
So have their been any updates for the missing Oceangate sub? Did they die?
yeah the military knew the sub imploded back when they lost contact with it but didn't tell anyone so there were 10s of millions of dollars spent trying to find them for no reason
Wait what?!
WHY?!
Fucking...
Millions wasted trying to help some rich idiots that KNOWINGLY CUT CORNERS but nah we can't afford to help the poor.
I fucking hate everything
Pissed owl
That sounds right, but they also just admitted they have a giant always on system for detecting subs after anyway. Also, really funny that finding out the implosion involved checking the atlantic ocean's security tapes.
That's been public knowledge since forever. There are a bunch of different sonar arrays for different purposes, and modern military sonar can apparently hear individual people walking around on subs in some cases (though modern diesel-electric subs running on battery power are apparently distressingly invisible)
It was more like they heard something that sounded an awful lot like an implosion at around the time that contact was lost with the sub and around that area, but they didn't want to assume just in case they were wrong and the guys were still alive in there.
Yeah I read something that said he didn’t want to go at all and was scared but went bc his dad was a weeb for the titanic and it was on fathers day, pretty terrible parenting evidently
nope, dont listen, we're still looking, infact, i have a go fund me where i'll go look myself
This may sound like a bit but it is not
I just got banned from a dragon enthusiast discord for posting a picture of sir gawain
just spent $75 on antifascist stickers and a "john brown did nothing wrong" shirt so i can sticker bomb every piece of equipment i've seen the nazitrash at my gym use.
My boss told us he thinks the submarine was sabotaged or something because "there's no way that a bunch of billionaires paid $250,000 to get on a sub that was so unsafe" lol
So I torrented a big retro-porn collection, and started playing it all randomly on my TV in the background while I did other things. I looked up from my laptop to see a woman pegging a guy with her leg. She was up well past her ankle. I was shocked, then I thought "How the hell is that slender short guy taking her entire foot in his ass?"
And then she pulled out, and I saw that her leg ended at the ankle. All-in-all I was rather impressed that she had turned what others consider a disability into a unique way to have a good time with her partners.
Edit: Apparently she was famous for it, she went by the name Long Jeanne Silver.