Mission & Project Info | NOAA’s Aquarius Undersea Laboratory
Mission Blog

Whoops, it’s actually day four now and we are in the final stages of decompressing, approaching four feet, so we’ll be back on the surface in just over three hours. Dewey came down to join us yesterday afternoon, acting as oxygen tender to watch over us the first 70 minutes, then staying to help take a shift running the exhaust controls. For those who haven’t already heard how we decompress, I’ll mention it briefly here. The whole process takes 16 and a half hours and is accomplished by closing/sealing the swinging door to the wet porch, then exhausting the main and entry locks to the surface through three hoses. Aquarius never leaves the bottom, we just “depressurize” the interior. Once we reach zero feet of seawater (fsw), or surface inside Aquarius, we hold for a short time to make sure no one has the bends, then we pressurize Aquarius back to 45 fsw so we can open the door to the wet porch. We are greeted there by two ascent divers, Tim and Jason have the call this time, and they escort us back to the surface on what is essentially a very short repetitive dive. If Aquarius were very deep like some habitats in the past, the actual ascent to the surface would have to be via a diving bell, but this method of surfacing from shallow air saturations has been successfully used since the ’70s.

Day two of the mission was dedicated almost entirely to our inspections, survey, and operational review, and day three saw an end to diving at 10:00 in the morning to be ready for deco. Looking back on this short mission we accomplished what we had set out for ourselves. Most importantly we conducted our special American Bureau of Shipping certification inspection/survey, as well as a visit by US Navy Diving/NAVSEA to review their waiver with us to allow Navy divers to saturate in Aquarius. Secondly we did a successful test of a new waystation with umbilical capabilities that will allow divers saturated in Aquarius to conduct three hour dives at the PTC mentioned on day one. Lastly and certainly not any less important, was that we conducted a successful first mission for the year after four months of off-season maintenance; and we had Ryan serve admirably as hab tech on his first saturation. This was also Jason’s and Derek’s first missions topside on our team, and their contributions before and during the mission helped make it a success.

Next up are the US Navy SRDD divers, coming for two back-to-back 5 day missions. They dive the MK16 rebreather exclusively, and our techs, first Dewey and Roger, then Justin and Roger, will be diving our Inspiration rebreathers, so our HP compressors on the Life Support Buoy overhead should get a nice vacation.

Until next mission,
The ARB Team