Staff training and system checks
Craig Cooper, NURC/UNCW
Operations for 2003 will commence with a relatively short four day saturation, serving as a “shakedown mission” to test systems following the winter maintenance season. During the mission, the aquanauts will be working with some new data acquisition sensors and monitors, installing excursion lines to some of the more remote sites, and working with topside support divers to deploy and assemble a new aquanaut waystation with comms and underwater tank filling capabilities. This third waystation now supporting aquanauts @ 95 fsw is called the Kamper Station, and it will allow scientists working on the deeper reefs around Aquarius to fill tanks closer to their work sites, instead of traveling another 600 feet to the habitat to fill. Topside divers will deploy the Kamper from our work boat, and final assembly will be completed by the saturation divers, who have six hours bottom time allowable, opposed to 25 minutes for the topside team.
Habitat technicians for this mission are and Byron Croker, lead electronics technician, and Program Director Craig Cooper. They will be joined by three non–staff members: Dale Anderson, Aquarius Technical Advisory Committee (ATAC) member and the original construction engineer/manager of Aquarius in 1986, Angelo Sanchez, Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) diver medic, and David Nastasi, NEDU diver/electrician. The Navy divers’ participation was made possible with a USN Deep Submergence waiver, thanks to Supervisor of Salvage and Diving, CAPT Jim Wilkins. It marks the first time since the Navy’s Sealab program in the 1960’s that USN divers are saturating in a seafloor habitat, and sheds light on hope for continued cooperative efforts between the Navy and NOAA.