Lead-A Johns Hopkins University engineering professor helped guide an underwater vehicle this week to one of the coldest, darkest, most remote places on Earth.
Nut Graph-Louis Whitcomb and his team - safe and dry aboard a research vessel in the western Pacific - guided the 18-foot-long robotic submersible Nereus by remote control as it plunged to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The dive marked the first time since 1998 that man has probed so far into the crushing depths of the Earth's greatest abyss.
Several quotes were used to support the story-
a)"It is a humbling experience to remotely pilot a vehicle into such an extreme, hostile, lightless environment," said Whitcomb, 47, one of three principal investigators with the expedition.
b)
"The temperature is [near freezing] and the pressure is 1,100 times the pressure we experience on the Earth's surface," Whitcomb said via e-mail from the research ship Kilo Moana, operated from Guam by the University of Hawaii.
c)"Nereus is capable of this task," Whitcomb said, but "it is not the ideal vehicle for this particular operation if, for example, heavy manipulation of wreckage is required."
Gave more background info on Whitcomb-
Whitcomb's private time has been devoted to an old wooden sailboat and, with his wife, to the rescue of golden retrievers. At work, he directs Hopkins' Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, where he developed systems for guiding and scaling the forces applied by surgical robots."He's very committed to systems that have real-world impact," said Greg Hager, a Hopkins computer scientist and long-time friend.Whitcomb'scontribution to Nereus was its navigation system.
The story ended with a reference back to Whitcomb-
Other Hopkins scientists assisting Whitcomb onboard include Stephen Martin, James Kinsey, Michael Jakuba and doctoral candidate Sarah Webster.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.robot05jun05,0,7192868.story
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good example!
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