High-Tech Exosuit Lets Scientist Divers Explore Underwater Canyons

[Buster's Uncle]

High-Tech Exosuit Lets Scientist Divers Explore Underwater Canyons
LiveScience.com
By Marc Lallanilla, Assistant Editor  11 hours ago



Michael Lombardi, the dive safety officer for the American Museum of Natural History, trains in the Exosuit. In July, scientists will test the suit as a scientific tool off the coast of New England.



Remember that scene in "Aliens" where Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley dons a Power Loader exoskeleton to do battle with the evil alien queen? Yeah, that was nothing.

Marine biologists and engineers have now developed a massive Exosuit weighing 530 lbs. (240 kilograms) designed for ocean depths down to 1,000 feet (305 meters) — another extreme environment where no one can hear you scream.

Researchers will take the Exosuit on its maiden journey this July, when they will use it to take samples and conduct imaging studies of the animals that live in "The Canyons," a region off the New England coast where the continental shelf plunges to depths of more than 10,000 feet (3,050 m).

The one-of-a-kind Exosuit, on display at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) now through March 5, measures 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall and is made of hard metal and other materials. The pressurized suit has four 1.6-horsepower thrusters to propel the diver up, down, forward, backward or to the side.

Additionally, the Exosuit — with an oxygen system that provides up to 50 hours of life support — is equipped with a fiber-optic tether that allows for two-way communication, oxygen and pressure monitoring, and a live video feed.

The researchers on the July expedition will study bioluminescence and biofluorescence in the mesopelagic zone, found at 656 to 3,281 feet (200 to 1,000 m) below the ocean's surface, where light is dim and pressure can be 30 times greater than at the surface.

Bioluminescence is the light created by living organisms through a chemical reaction in the creatures' bodies. Biofluorescence, on the other hand, occurs when organisms absorb high-energy, short-wavelength light (such as ultraviolet light), then re-emit that light at a longer wavelength. This process makes the organisms appear to glow with an eerie, colored light (often green or red).


Earth's greatest migration

Billions of marine animals migrate vertically on a daily basis from deep within the ocean's darkest abysses to the surface, where they feed at night, only to drop thousands of feet back to the depths before dawn. Scientists have called this mass migration — known as diel vertical migration or DVM — the largest migration on Earth.

Many of these migrating fish, plankton and other animals have bioluminescent or biofluorescent properties, but scientist have only studied them with remote instruments or from samples found in trawl nets.

That's what makes the Exosuit a giant leap forward for marine biologists, who have never before been able to study these little-known organisms in their natural habitat.

"Our access to these deeper open-water and reef habitats has been limited, which has restricted our ability to investigate the behavior and flashing patterns of bioluminescent organisms, or to effectively collect fishes and invertebrates from deep reefs," John Sparks, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ichthyology, said in a statement. "The Exosuit could get us one step closer to achieving these goals."

The July expedition will be a collaboration among several groups: the J.F. White Contracting Company in Framingham, Mass., (which owns the Exosuit), the AMNH, the John B. Pierce Laboratory at Yale University, Baruch College-City University of New York, the University of Rhode Island and Arizona State University.


http://news.yahoo.com/high-tech-exosuit-lets-scientist-divers-explore-underwater-135538589.html

[Buster's Uncle]

This $1.3 Million Exosuit Will Plunge Scientists to the Depths of the Ocean
Alyssa Bereznak  Feb 28, 2014






On Thursday, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled the “Exosuit,” a diving system that scientists hope will broaden their ability to study unknown species of bioluminescent and biofluorescent creatures at the depths of the oceans, instead of having to bring them up to the surface, as is the standard practice.

According to the scientists behind the project, the light communications of these little-studied specimens may offer new, valuable insight for biomedical research related to cancer cell tagging and the study of brain activity.

Measuring at about 6½ feet tall and weighing more than 530 pounds, the contraption can safely carry a human diver 1,000 feet below the water. At that depth, an unprotected human would be subjected to about 30 times the normal surface pressure.

The suit itself took about 15 years to develop. It is an update of the 1979 diving system known as the “JIM suit.”



The JIM suit, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons


The modern-day Exosuit cost about $600,000 to make and comes with an action figure’s list of cool accessories: a fiber-optic tether, topside control instrumentation and a custom-made remotely operated vehicle (aka a DeepReef-ROV) to aid with fish data collection. The entire set of equipment cost about $1.3 million to build.

What sets it apart is the ease with which scientists can move around in it underwater. Divers can rotate the suit’s limbs thanks to its red, oil-filled rotary joints. Each hand pod (which is connected to a claw), has a manipulator, which project coordinator Michael Lombardi says are relatively easy to control.

“It can be rather difficult, but also very intuitive,” Lombardi, who is also the museum’s dive safety officer, said at the presentation. “We did a training exercise in July, and an individual with very little dive experience, after about an hour in the suit, was able to pick a dime up off the ground. At first glance, this is a big, clunky thing; you think, how could you possibly do anything delicate? But to pick up a dime — there’s also no reason that we also can’t collect a delicate jellyfish down the road.”





The suit allows researchers to work below water for up to five hours and will come with a collection of specially modified hand tools: jars, bags, scalpels, syringes and a special suction device to capture animals. The idea is to carefully tease these delicate specimens into a container that can then be placed in front of a sophisticated camera for imaging.

“They’re very delicate, gelatinous things, so the idea of dragging them up is not very nice,” Vincent Pieribone, the project’s chief scientist, said at the unveiling. “They come up and they don’t look so good. So if you can imagine the ROV sitting in this environment in the water at night all on its own and the suit moving around collecting creatures that are moving by, sort of gently coaxing them into a container and then placing that in the front of a dark tube which contains a very sensitive camera, putting them at the exact focal point for imaging. Then the operators could run various routines of flashing lights to stimulate the organisms to get a bioluminescent response.”





According to Pieribone, who is a researcher at Yale’s John B. Pierce Laboratory, being able to study the response of these specimens may allow his lab to read out the electrical activity of a brain structure of an organism without ever touching it. Eventually, he hopes to develop this information to create brain-machine interfacing for individuals who have had injuries or damage to their nervous system. “These animals hold the key to that,” he said.

This July, a team of researchers will travel 100 miles off the New England coast to explore an underwater geographic region nicknamed “The Canyons,” an area of particular interest because it drops to depths of more than 10,000 feet. Using the suit, divers will have access to animals that migrate through this zone at night. The ROV will be outfitted with three to 10 cameras (one of which is a low-light camera; another is used to look at neurons). The goal is to capture these species as they generate visible light through chemical reactions in their organs and submit that information to the computers outfitted in the ROV via the fiber cable connected to the apparatus. Previous research was limited because these species were able to be studied only after being removed from the ocean via trawl nets or being recorded with remote instruments.

“The history of going down beneath the water starts with romantic ideas of treasure hunting and shipwrecks,” Baruch College marine biologist David Gruber said at the presentation. “As scientists, we’re also trying to get down there. But we’re really only seeing the skin of the ocean. To get there, we need to design these tools. The Exosuit is our tool.”

The Exosuit will be on display at the American Museum of Natural History from now until March 5.


https://www.yahoo.com/tech/this-1-3-million-exosuit-will-plunge-scientists-to-the-78111107272.html