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Have you been watching Okeanos explorer? If not, this week is your chance!

Dr. Martini July 30, 2016
Klaus Burgle, "City under the Sea"
Klaus Burgle, “City under the Sea”

I’m kind of obsessed with Okeanos Explorer. Why? Because being able to watch a live feed of an ROV exploring the deep ocean on the TV in my living room is pretty amazing. THE FUTURE IS NOW PEOPLE.

Okeanos Explorer is a NOAA boat whose sole business is ocean exploration. It uses two ROVs equipped with mega giant cameras and a network of satellite intertubes to bring you live feed of seafloor exploration. It beams back all sorts of amazing images of weird deep sea sea beasties and geology. Quite often they find specimens they have never even seen before! Just last mission they even explored a wrecked WWII plane! Current mission: The Wake Islands in the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument.

July 24 - Preparing for one last dive A unique down-looking view of a ROV recovery at night. Carl VerPlanck captured this image by strapping his camera to a crane and extending it 30-ft above the deck. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program There is much to do before our last possible dive on Monday, July 25. Though we completed a very successful ROV dive on the off-axis sulfide mounts today, the ROV Team will likely be working late into the evening. Serios's HMI lights failed soon after this morning's launch and a vertical thruster on Little Hercules also failed. The Team expects the HMI light issue will be a relatively easy fix. However, The vertical thruster is likely more problematic. The thruster had failed the previous day and had been replaced with a spare. Because we lost the spare the very next day, the ROV Team must look deeper into the system to find the problem. We're hoping that they'll be able to get everything operational in time for one last dive tomorrow morning. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Galapagos Rift Expedition 2011.
Bird’s Eye view of Okeanos ROV deployment!

The next dive will happen this Sunday. You can catch all the feeds on your compy at their streaming link http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/media/exstream/exstream.html

If you have a smart TV, ROKU, Apple TV or really any other streaming device you can WATCH IT ON YOUR TV. Just pull up the YouTube app and search for Okeanos Explorer. Camera 1 is where the action is, but Camera 2 (ROV #2) and Camera 3 (Control room) are pretty neat too.

You can also follow along on Twitter at #Okeanos, lots of biologists online to identify all the things! Or post-dive check out Christopher Mah over at Echinoblog with some sea-beastie round ups.

You might see me, the mighty sea cucumber, on the next dive
You might see me, the mighty sea cucumber, on the next dive.

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