The Benthic Rover II has a sort of WALL-E vibe. But instead of exploring a garbage-strewn landscape, it roams the Pacific seafloor, 13,000 feet deep.
each way to make the trip between Earth and Mars—and good luck remotely piloting a rover in real time with that kind of delay. But radio waveswater. So, instead, BR-II uses acoustic signals to talk to another robot, a floating glider that MBARI scientists release from shore four times a year.
At the back of the robot are two titanium spheres—each somewhere between the size of a yoga ball and a beach ball—filled with batteries that power a year of continuous operation. When it’s time to resupply power, the scientists retrieve BR-11 by sending it a signal that releases a 250-pound weight attached to the robot’s belly. Once the weight is dropped, those flotation devices that look like eyes begin to do their work.
This long observation period has given MBARI scientists unprecedented insight into the goings-on of the deep, across both wide stretches of the seafloor and across long timescales. That will be critical to understanding our planet’s carbon cycle. At the ocean’s surface, a galaxy of algae known as phytoplankton sequesters carbon, the way plants do on land. Then the algae get eaten by tiny animals known as zooplankton.
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