FeMO3 Dive Cruise 2008
Report Day 12 -- Friday 3 October 2008 -- Loihi Ain't No Wireless Hotspot
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FeMO3 Dive Cruise 2008 |
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While Shawn takes some time to prepare lesson materials based on our new cruise data for in his classroom, I step in to write today’s daily report. My role on the R/V Thompson is to bring you this website, but also to manage the massive amounts of science data for the FeMO scientists and to archive it for perpetuity on the world wide web. As it turns out, at sea this job amounts to quite a challenge.
The most important reason is that Loihi ain’t no wireless hotspot! Although the volcano itself is believed to have formed above a hotspot in the Earth’s mantle, the research vessel on which we perform our research doesn’t compare to our daily experiences of fast cable modems, endless connectivity at work and school, and free wireless hotspots in every coffee shop and pizza place around the corner. Don’t get me wrong, the R/V Thompson is a modern research enterprise full with high-end computers, data servers and other high-tech instrumentation. But to get good internet connectivity from a ship riding the high-seas to the rest of the world is especially difficult.
Not too long ago the only connection was a very limited email service (four times a day) via a telephone satellite. This was expensive and allowed only for short text emails, but definitely no large attachments of images, pdf’s or science data. It is easy to see that this did not provide good support for the science being carried out at sea or for broadcasting the latest findings to interested audiences around the world.
About ten years ago a new system called SeaNET was installed on most US research vessels. It provides a direct satellite internet connection, not telephone! This is what is used on the R/V Thompson today and we are using it every day to upload all contents for this website, including this daily report and even some limited video conferencing with Shawn's classroom. However, this system has its intricacies, mostly related to a very limited bandwidth, giving us not more than the equivalent of a 58k modem with sometimes very intermittent service. Also, we have to share this connection with all other research vessels operating in the Pacific ocean, reducing the effective bandwidth even further.
Just think about it, how can you place an satellite disk on a ship that constantly rolls and pitches on the ocean’s waves? The disk would be moving all the time, loosing its connection with the satellite instantly. This was cleverly solved by placing the satellite disk on several big gyros in a large “golf ball” kind of capsule. The gyros compensate for the ships movement and keep the satellite disk level and squarely aimed at one of the SeaNET satellites that stand in the sky above the equator. However, in very rough seas the gyros cannot keep up with the amount of movement and the connection might still fail. The connection may also fail if some equipment that is mounted on the R/V Thompson is blocking the signal between the satellite disk and the locked-in SeaNET satellite if the R/V Thompson is heading in certain directions. All in all, this provides technical challenges, but with good help of the technicians onboard these can be easily overcome and navigated.
We hope you keep enjoying our website! We got 8 more days to go until the end of the FeMO2008 expedition ...
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