Author: Arianna Johns Page 1 of 3

1PPS and Dry Wells

On November 3, 2013

1PPS(1 Pulse Per Second) is what is used by the multibeam systems to align itself in time with the GPS units that allow us to know our location in space. So basically it is the fourth dimension in the puzzle that is bathymetric mapping. This most important piece came crashing down. In order to fix it I needed to know the pulse was actually coming through the coax cable that runs from the GPS unit. In order to answer that part of the puzzle I had to use an oscilloscope to see that the pulse that is only 10milliseconds in duration was coming across at the correct voltage of five volts. It was, so I knew the pulse was there. The next part was to figure out why it seemed to be intermittent. I ended up reterminating the end coming from the GPS and replacing the wiring block on the GPS. It seems to have fixed the problem(knock on wood).

The next massive problem I ran into was the Knudsen 15Khz was giving a really weird return. No one brought this to my attention, primarily because I am technically a video intern on this cruise. There is no Marine tech aboard this vessel so I kind of stepped in on that end of things. When I saw the massive hard to describe buggy returns I knew something was amiss. I started looking at the settings and trying to figure out what was wrong. One of the things I could not do was stop the acquisition of data in order to trouble shoot the problem because all this is going out live on the internet. The show must go on as they say. So I waited till they were done multibeaming and done for the night to start in on the problem. I shut everything down, rebooted and started pinging with only the 15Khz. This gave me a negative return and the sound of the ducers in the ship was extremely loud. I immediately stopped pinging and almost threw up. I knew there were very few things that could cause this issue, mainly there was a large probability that the wells these ducers were sitting in had run dry. They are wet mounted in boxes on the hull of the ship to allow for the transmission of sound through the hull. As I started asking people who have been on the ship a while questions I knew I had to find the documents telling me whether these were wet transducers or dry. After digging for about an hour I found my answer. They were indeed supposed to be wet. I had to wait till the next day to get clearance from the people who actually work on the ship to open the hatch to the transducers, and we looked at the sight glass to see that it was completely dry. This is bad, very very bad. Not only does it completely destroy data, it can harm the very very very expensive arrays of transducers. I am now waiting till the show is over and Hercules(ROV) and Argus(ROV tender) are on deck to run some tests on the transducers to see if there is damage.

E/V Nautilus

By Arianna Johns

On October 31, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive

Primarily the Nautilus is an exploration vessel that spends time exploring the ocean depths using an Kongsberg EM302 multibeam, and the ROV’s Hercules and Argus. Argus is the tending ROV to the Hercules. One of the most important parts of this ship is the live streaming video to the internet of all operations on this ship. This is the system that I am helping maintain. The satellite dish part that I showed in my last blog post is one of the servos that steer the dish and allow the tracking of the satellites. That was from an older analog system, the one on this ship is a digital system. Basically physically they are the same. The major difference is the way the computer tracking the satellite talks to the servos driving the dish. You can watch all the action as we explore an active volcano called Kick ’em Jenny. This feed can be seen on www.explorationnow.org. I hope you get a chance to watch some of the undiscovered things we are about to reveal to the whole world. It should be fun, interesting and extremely informative.

Pictorial of the most epic rebuild

By Arianna Johns

On October 14, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive, R/V Endeavor, University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography

This is a brief tale of an encoder gone bad. The culprit held gently in my rather sparsely manicured hands. It is a plane simple thingy(sorry for the technical jargon I will attempt to keep it to a minimum) but it it nestled deep inside the guts of a box so cunning, so devious it might be the direct descendant of the original Lament Configuration.

Yup inside that there box lies the resolver. Remember kids no directions! So don’t try this at home unless you are fool hearty enough to take something apart that you aren’t sure what’s inside. If you are the type that loves the unknown puzzle of how something works, and are fairly adept at putting things back right once you have messed them up, then you are going to love this next picture.

BOOM!!! GEARS!!!! Everyone loves gears!!! Come on there is an entire fashion movement dedicated to gears and how awesome they are. If you don’t believe me, or live under an fashion rock check out steam punk clothing sometime, its AWESOME you won’t be disappointed. So yeah this is actually how I think. Like I see the picture of the gears in my head, now it would be impossible for me to describe what I see without getting overly measurey and mathy and no one wants that right now, especially not me, so this idea was born. So you might be wondering why is she showing me gears when she should be showing me some resolver thingy, what ever that might be. Well because you see the left gear with the shaft, the right cam, and then in the middle back there is a shaft with a gear all the way at the top through the metal plate, yeah that is the resolver shaft.

There is the resolver, you can see the read of the shaft in the middle bearing.

See those two philips head screws there on either side of the resolver shaft, yeah those were buried under all those gears. I had to take the whole assembly apart to get at them in order to take the resolver off. Well that was nightmare number one-ish, morphing into number two, but the next one is that whilst I was removing the various shafts and gears it suddenly dawned on me that the cam shaft stuff had no top dead center path of travel demarcation line thingy. And this cam shaft is basically what is telling the sensors whether or not it as a point where the antenna needs to unwind to keep from ripping the wiring out of it…yeah…let that one set in for a minute…rip the wiring all out the dish if this thing is messed up…stress much kids?…

Sleep tight kids, and remember if it was easy everyone would be doing it! Love the challenge, embrace the mind bogling, rock the occasional spelling error.

Back in the saddle again

By Arianna Johns

On October 6, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive

So here I am again, or still, it all depends on how you look at it. I had two weeks off before going on my first actual job as a marine tech aboard the R/V Atlantic Explorer. If you ever get a chance to sail on that ship, take it. Every one is super chill, science gets done safely and with sa carefree attitude only find in island cultures. I did that for a week and a half, had a couple days to get things together and move up to Rhode Island.

So here I am working at the EPIC Inner Space Center. The name alone is awesome, and then you realize how many people they are sharing this ground breaking, as it happens science with, and it is fundamentally earth shatteringly awesome. I spent last week taking apart part of the satellite system that controls the motion of the dish. This tiny 8inX8inX4in box with gears in it had gone bad. Without getting into too technical of detail I took it apart, found that faulty part and am now waiting on the parts to come. One company makes the part that goes in this box, the company that made the box is now out of business so there is no one to service them really, so since I have a rather long mechanical background this is not something that is too difficult for me to figure out. Twelve years in the automotive industry is finally paying off in some cool ways.

One of the other major important things I am learning right now is video editing type stuff. See I know so little about it I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe what exactly I am doing with the incoming feed other than saving it to disk, and taking out bad video, which equals editing type stuff in my head. So yeah its been a busy great week.

Multi-core-apalooza

By Arianna Johns

On August 19, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive, R/V Atlantis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Multicore-a-polooza is at an end. We did the last multicore today. Now all that is left of my last cruise are some heatprobe measurements, a couple JASON deployments, and one CTD cast, then its home. A much needed break after six of the most amazing months of my life. To say this internship has changed my life is a fundamental understatement. I came into this industry knowing barely anything about how ships operate, yet here I am today and I feel as if I am more comfortable with the everyday comings and goings of a ship than I am with a regular job. The idea that sea going life is romantic and that seeing foreign places will be amazing is something I thought at first, and those notions were quickly thrown overboard like yesterday’s slop. It is a hard job, it can be a lonely and exasperating job at times, but at the end of the day it is being able to wake up the next day and not hate your job that is what I was looking for. This job has allowed me to fulfill that in so many ways. Six months have come and gone. It is now time to figure out where life is leading next, hopefully working fulltime somewhere as a technician.

6 Months In

By Arianna Johns

On August 11, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive, R/V Atlantis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Today technically marks the six month day when I landed in South Africa to board the KNORR. Six months ago I had no clue what I was getting into. I had no clue what to expect. To a certain extent I still don’t know what to expect from day to day. I have grown used to the regimented life that is living aboard a ship. 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, a day or two in port every once in a while that you can get away from the ship, other than that it’s been nothing but blue water and work. Not saying I haven’t enjoyed every minute of it. This internship experience is what you make of it. I chose to learn as much as possible about a career I very much wish to continue in. I chose to inundate myself as much in the culture and work as I possibly could. I wanted to know exactly what I might be getting into if I were to continue this.

You begin to get so used to breakfast at 730, lunch at 1130 and dinner at 1730, never getting an actual good night of sleep because your room is either next to the bow thruster, directly under some crane, or have a roommate that works not quite opposite shifts. These things become the norm. Your old life becomes an exotic thing. A bed that is large enough to stretch out on becomes almost a novelty. Something as simple as taking a bath to shave your legs instead of standing awkwardly against a bulkhead and hoping the sea state stays nice become things you dream about in the odd nights you actually end up dreaming. Not saying this is a rough life by any stretch of the imagination. It is fundamentally amazing to get to witness science first hand. The little things begin to count way more than they used to. I love listening to music. I love going to live shows. I gave up several hundred dollars of concert tickets to take this internship. I love movies, watching new and amazing art house films is a big part of what I do when I am home with my friends. You begin to miss these things. You begin to miss sitting around having a beer on a Friday night with friends and watching some weird movie they dug up out of some dusty box in the basement of some rental house they just installed granite counter tops in; only to be confused by the lack of plot, and slightly bummed because the subtitles stop half way through and you don’t speak enough Russian or Turkish or whatever odd language it is in to fully understand what is going on. But as the movie fades into the background the night becomes more about the conversations that spring up randomly, the coming and going of friends throughout the evening always makes for a shift in dialog that no Shakespeare or Huxley could ever have attempted to write.

You get some of this on ships, but by the second week in everything is routine, you only run into the people you share the same shift with. There are exceedingly small amounts of randomly running into someone. You see the same people at the same times, every day. It is not uncommon to go for a two week cruise and meet someone for the first time as you are both heading down the gang way to the nearest bar. It is this routine that both has become a comfort and something I have become fearful of. What am I going to do when I get back home? I have a brief job lined up a couple weeks after I get back, but then what? My comfortable routine of 12 hour blocks will be no more defined by the ship I am on. I will be able to walk more than a couple hundred feet in one direction. I won’t have to plan my shopping list by port stops and how long the cruise is going to be. I will be free to accidentally run out of something and it won’t be a big deal to run to the store at 1am and grab some shampoo. Due to my planning I have thus far run out of nothing of importance. I have managed to quit smoking, a 21 year habit that has nearly at times defined my presence to some people. For the most part I always had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth when I was working on a car. I would sooner run out of clean socks than cigarettes, but no more. I am done. When your smoking habit can legally buy beer it’s time to give it up. Having had malignant melanoma, and gall stones they thought might be cancerous, which caused me to have my gall bladder removed, I feel it is time to stop pounding the proverbial coffin nails.

So yeah six months can change your entire way of looking at things. I have a whole suite of knowledge that I did not possess prior to this experience. I have run high definition satellite systems, trouble shot DGPS systems, built and rebuilt various scientific instruments, trouble shot pieces of equipment I have never seen before, and learned more about myself than I ever thought possible.

From Satellites to C-Nav

By Arianna Johns

On August 1, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive, R/V Atlantis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The last cruise I was put into a situation I never thought I would have to face. I was running the High definition satellite dish that fed the live feed of the ROV JASON and associated shows back to shore as an outreach project headed by the URI Innerspace Center. It put all my trouble shooting skills to use, and proved to me that I could learn systems I had never even seen before and actually repair them.

Now I am back out in the Northern Pacific doing more multi-beaming and slowly trying to suss out a massive ongoing issue with our C-NAV gps system. I wish I could say at this moment I understood it, but I don’t. I am learning as I go, using the one tool that has rarely let me down, my uncanny ability to find underlying issues in complex systems.

On another note I can honestly say that being on a boat for three straight months, seeing science parties and crew members come and go, you begin to become much more a part of the ship crew familial group than one of the transient scientists. You develop friendships that are working relationships in such a close way that often times a glance or a small gesture can speak volumes during the chaotic times that can occur when massive problems are breaking loose.

Trial by fire

By Arianna Johns

On July 14, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive

Originally the plan was I would be taking this cruise off and getting a little down time in my favorite city in the world Seattle Washington. But as luck would have it things went from okay to bad in a couple of days. I am still aboard the R/V Atlantis, which now feels more like home than anything. I am currently incharge of running a satellite van that is feeding the world live high definition streaming video and audio from the ship. So anytime you would like you can log on to http://explorationnow.org/atlantis/ and see what is going on in the main science lab or on the bottom of the ocean using JASON cams. Initially it was supposed to be just me realligning a satellite dish whenever the resolver could not reaquire the satellite, but as so few things go as planned my job has become much more involved. Today our first live day with me at the helm all the networks started crashing without me having changed a thing. Turns out we have a problem with the DHCP assigning portion of our router, which granted can be fixed easily enough on land, or with a few simple steps, but when you can’t disrupt what is going out to the world and people are watching you have to work around the problem quickly. So I had to do some back door networking tricks that before today I never knew even existed. I wish I could explain to you everything that I managed to do, but I was doing it in such a hurry that I don’t even remember each step I took to get it all running again.I would write more but my brain is completely drained of any thoughts that are cogent beyond “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” But I have decently high speed internet going and the show went on without a hitch. WIN FOR INTERNS!!!! We really can fix problems and keep things going when put to the test. This was quite possibly the fasted 12 hour shift of this six month period, and it isn’t over until I can reset some routers and reassign some IP addresses to finish the fixes which will have to wait until around 11pm pst.

Watching Bubbles and dodging waves

By Arianna Johns

On July 7, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive, R/V Atlantis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

This short two week cruise has been very interesting. I have spent the majority of the time working with the Kongsberg EM-122 Multibeam system doing sea floor mapping and using the new water column data gathering portion of this system to track methane hydrate bubble plumes. I have learned to use a new type of satellite system that allows for 10Mb out and 512K inbound data streams. This system is monsterously faster than the current used HISEASNET systems that a majority of oceanographic vessels are equipted with.

The past few days have been rather rough seas, sometimes upwards of 20 foot swells with well over 40 kt sustained winds. Luckily we were able to recover all the (~20) Ocean Bottom Seismometers were recovered before this weather pattern stuck. The crew worked around the clock generally in 18 hour shifts getting this done with the hopes of being able to recover 2 lost OBS that a previous couple cruises were unable to find. The plan was to use the DSV JASON to drive the bottom canyons where the OBS’s were believed to be. Since the weather was so rough though this was not a possibility.

Tomorrow we go in to port a day early since the weather is not going to clear in time to allow us to attempt another go at the lost OBS’s. We tried sending accoustic commands to them in hopes that we could astablish comms. Using the ships hydrophones I sat watch listening to the soothing sounds of accoustic messages and water rushing past for hours in hopes of hearing a faint reply. Alas no reply was ever heard, so those two OBS’s are still lost and only Davey Jones may know where they are.

Hanging out in Davy Jones’ livingroom

By Arianna Johns

On June 28, 2013

In MATE Blog Archive

This past week has been exceedingly hectic to the point that I didn’t realize it was friday until I just now when I updated this blog. Ship time is a different thing sometimes.

I just spent the past hour in the Jason Deep Submersible ROV van. It is a tiny 40 square foot box with more tv’s and xbox controllers and odd specialized controllers than anywhere else I have ever seen. Quite simply I watched them attach a shackle to a trawl resistant mooring so it could be brought to the surface. Now connecting a shackle is simple on the surface. But when you are 300 meters below the surface in 15 foot viz water and your only depth perception is being able to zoom in and out on camera this simple task becomes an ballet of skin. The manipulator arms are nearly four foot long with little graspy hands at the ends of fully rotatable wrists. The pilot maneuvered these hands with the precision of a heart surgeon. This is another one of those times where the written word fails to describe the amazing feat of ingenuity and dexterity of the actual action accomplished. But if you would like to see this happening live we are broadcasting live streaming video from the ship.

It can be viewed at explorationnow.org/atlantis