HROV Nereus Extends Deep Sea Exploration
Rhonda Moniz
December 16, 2011
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.