Mariana Trench Mystery: NASA Preparing to Map Ocean’s Deepest Points
- 2 years ago
WASHINGTON — The Mariana Trench mystery could be unlocked by NASA.
NASA is using deep sea exploration of places like the Mariana trench as a means to look for clues of what oceans on other planets could look like and an extreme testing ground for its technology, according to the BBC.
The deepest parts of Earth's oceans, known as the hadal zone, are made up of trenches and troughs up to 11 kilometers below the surface of the planet’s oceans, and as part of its interest in this area, NASA is currently helping build a new autonomous underwater vehicle called Orpheus to help further map the more inaccessible parts and act as a ‘gateway’ vehicle for further exploration.
In a sign of the back and forth relationship between deep sea and space exploration, Orpheus, which follows on from an unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing in 2014, will use similar visual navigation technology to NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover to identify rock formations, shells and other features on the ocean floor and create three-dimensional maps of key features that have not previously been mapped.
NASA is using deep sea exploration of places like the Mariana trench as a means to look for clues of what oceans on other planets could look like and an extreme testing ground for its technology, according to the BBC.
The deepest parts of Earth's oceans, known as the hadal zone, are made up of trenches and troughs up to 11 kilometers below the surface of the planet’s oceans, and as part of its interest in this area, NASA is currently helping build a new autonomous underwater vehicle called Orpheus to help further map the more inaccessible parts and act as a ‘gateway’ vehicle for further exploration.
In a sign of the back and forth relationship between deep sea and space exploration, Orpheus, which follows on from an unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing in 2014, will use similar visual navigation technology to NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover to identify rock formations, shells and other features on the ocean floor and create three-dimensional maps of key features that have not previously been mapped.