News
Smart sub heads to work in Arctic; Unmanned vehicle sets off to map ocean floor and define borders
The Toronto Star
Thu Apr 8 2010
Page: A7
Section: News
Byline: Paul Watson Toronto Star
The cutting-edge smart sub built to help define Canada's Arctic borders is set for her first, and one of her most treacherous, missions: She has to find her way to work.
Explorer, a torpedo-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) affectionately known as Canada's yellow submarine, had her final test run Wednesday.
Then, in the shelter of a red-and-white tent shaped like a Quonset hut, she recharged her batteries on the ice pack 4,100 kilometres northwest of Toronto, preparing for a perilous journey in support of Canadian Arctic sovereignty.
If all goes as planned, the sub's human minders will inch her out of the heated tent along a short set of rails, crank her up and over a rectangular ice hole by block and tackle, and gently lower her into the dark Arctic sea Thursday. When her single propeller powers up, Explorer will descend more than 2,500 metres below the ice to navigate undersea hills, mountains and valleys, looking for her work station: a few tents on a drifting ice floe some 300 kilometres, and three days' journey, to the northeast of here.
She will be travelling solo, unable to call home or receive any guidance from the team of Canadian industry and government experts that designed, put her together and programmed her computer brain.
Like anxious parents, they will be nervously waiting for their steel-hulled baby to show up, sometime Sunday.
After months of testing, first in a Vancouver fjord and then beneath this desolate spot of windswept, High Arctic ice pack just south of Borden Island, Explorer's guardians feel good about her chances.
"It's encouraging that it's worked flawlessly until now," said Jacob Verhoef, the Geological Survey of Canada official who heads the operation mapping the Arctic sea floor with Coast Guard icebreakers, Explorer and other devices.
Canada has until 2013 to submit evidence in support of its Arctic territorial claim to the United Nations. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can claim territory beyond the normal limit of 200 nautical miles from shore for as far as the continental shelf extends unbroken.
Called the extended continental shelf, it is estimated to be as large as 1. 75 million square kilometres, or an area the size of three Prairie provinces, in Canada's Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, where Natural Resources Canada is mapping the sea floor in a hurry to meet the 2013 deadline. They're betting on Explorer to be a faster and relatively inexpensive way to get the detailed data they need to back up Canada's territorial claims, which are disputed by neighbours, including Russia and the U.S.
During a visit to the main camp Tuesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said he had heard rumours Russian paratroopers planned to parachute into the North Pole soon to show their flag in international Arctic territory.
Cannon, who earlier snapped a photo of Explorer and said he would show it to Russian foreign minister Sergie Lavrov, accused the Russians of performing Arctic publicity stunts while Canada works to solve sovereignty questions with science and engineering.
Explorer is programmed with a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. She is no genius, but is expected to make sound decisions.
She works through a list of choices and decides how to deal with shifting sea currents, underwater obstacles or other surprises, said Tristan Crees, project manager for Explorer's builder, International Submarine Engineering Ltd. , based in Port Coquitlam, B.C. The small firm, one of only a few in the world building smart submersibles, made Explorer and her backup for $5 million.
The vehicle doesn't have any cameras, which aren't very useful in the pitch black deep beneath the ice pack. She uses forward-looking sonar to see what's ahead and find a way around anything threatening.
As Explorer slips below the ice, her instructions are to cruise around 150 metres above the sea floor, heading for the last known location of fewer than a dozen people who will manage the smart sub from the ice floe during her sea- floor mapping mission.
"At the moment, it's moving very slowly, a couple of kilometres a day because there's not a lot of wind," Verhoef said in an interview here Tuesday, as engineers readied Explorer for her final test run.
The Borden camp receives almost hourly updates of the ice floe's Global Positioning System satellite coordinates. Further south in Resolute, on Ellesmere Island, other team members studied satellite images and weather conditions to estimate where the ice floe would be in several days, Verhoef said.
With that information, Explorer's handlers will tell her where she is supposed to end up. But she can't get help along the way from GPS signals because they don't penetrate polar ice.
Any mistakes the gyroscopes in her inertial guidance system make en route to the ice floe will multiply with time, Verhoef said.
If the weather suddenly turns bad, and the winds kick up again as they often do in the High Arctic, Explorer's search for the camp's homing beacon after three days of travelling could be very difficult.
"Within those three days, that point might have moved 30 to 40 kilometres," Verhoef said.
Depending on sea conditions, Explorer should be able to hear the beacon once she's 50 kilometres, perhaps less, from her destination.
The team pulling for Explorer to find her way is large, and around 40 of the team members are living in the ice camp south of Borden Island.
The sub arrived from Vancouver in pieces, in several crates. Once put back together, she lay immersed just below the ocean surface for 24 hours to make sure she didn't leak.
Her first trip away from the ice hole, which is about 5.5 metres long by 1.5 metres wide, was just five kilometres. By the third test run, she was out for more than nine hours.
Explorer's big test was a 24-hour, 100-kilometre voyage Wednesday.