HROV Nereus Extends Deep Sea Exploration

The Hybrid Undersea vehicle known as Neurus, named after the mythical deity with a fish tail and man’s torso took WHOI nine years to design and build. In 2009 Nereus dove to the deepest abyss, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, a dive to 36,000 feet with ambient pressures reaching over 1,000 times that of surface pressure. The hybrid vehicle know as an HROV can work as a free swimming vehicle or may be tethered to the ship by cable, making wide area ocean surveys and close up sampling and investigation of the sea floor possible. In its autonomous mode the vehicle is able to fly pre-programmed missions over the ocean floor to gather remote data.

 “Much of the ocean’s depth remains unexplored. Ocean scientists now have a unique tool to gather images, data, and samples from everywhere in the oceans, rather than those parts shallower than 6500 meters (4 miles),” said Julie Morris, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ocean Sciences Division, the principal sponsor of the $8 million project. “With its innovative technology, Nereus allows us to study and understand the ocean’s deepest regions, previously inaccessible.“The Mariana Trench is the deepest known part of the ocean. Reaching such extreme depths represents the pinnacle of technical challenges and the team is very pleased Nereus has been successful in reaching the very bottom to return imagery and samples from such a hostile world. With a robot like Nereus we can now explore virtually anywhere in the ocean,” said Andy Bowen, the project manager and principal developer of Nereus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “The trenches are virtually unexplored, and I am absolutely certain Nereus will enable new discoveries. I believe it marks the start of a new era in ocean exploration.”Aside from NSF, funds for Nereus have been provided by the Office of Naval Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russell Family Foundation, and WHOI.