Ashlee Vance demonstrates the Dive LD underwater vehicle, which uses reinforced composite panels and flooded interior design to protect electronics while carrying five geophysical payloads including side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiler for seafloor imaging and undersea cable detection.
Today, James and I are on a mission to put the Dive LD to the test.
These panels that we're looking at today are actually a reinforced composite. If we peeled the panels off, you would see small tubes inside this vehicle to protect the electronics, the computers that need to stay dry. But everything else inside the vehicle is flooded with water. This vehicle is configured with what we call a geophysical inspection suite. And there are actually 5 payloads that this vehicle carries. Just below where the break in the panel here is, this is a sensor that we call a side-scanning sonar. Okay. Side-scan sonar is essentially capable of producing acoustic imagery of the seafloor that looks to your eye like a photograph.
Okay.
So let's say you want to find an undersea cable.
The type of sensor that you would use to actually locate the object of interest is going to be something like a side-scan sonar.
The other sensor that's associated with that is an instrument we call a sub-bottom profiler. So let's say the mud turns into gravel, then turns into rock. You'll actually see where those transitions happen.
