Category: R/V Neil Armstrong Page 1 of 5

09/14/23 – 09/21/23

We just arrived back in Woods Hole! We spent the week transiting and thankfully avoiding Hurricane Lee in the Atlantic. Besides collecting data when we were outside of other country’s EEZs, we haven’t worked on any science operations so the crew has been using the time to catch up on work, start end of cruise reports, or relax. Highlight of the week was playing mario kart.

For personal projects, I cleaned the pesky PC02 filter again (if you don’t clean it periodically, it fills up with marine critters like krill and can get gross real fast, see below), made a sail bag out of old foul weather gear, 3D printed a cover for the cordless phone on the bridge so it won’t fall during a roll, wrote my resume and CV in LaTeX, organized some miscellaneous hardware pieces, helped Emily and Croy prepare for the Starlink installation once we’re docked, and packaged the final science data hard drive using Linux to give to the Chief Scientist.

The PC02 culprit

QOW: What is a marine technician, and what do they do?

The role of a marine technician depends on the ship they’re on and the institution they’re working with. For WHOI, marine technicians are classified as Engineering Assistants and are part of the Shipboard Scientific Services Group (SSG). It’s a unique niche on the ship. They act as a liaison between the ship’s crew and the science party, helping out with science operations and making sure the data that are collected underway are being archived properly. On the Armstrong, the SSGs service the science equipment like the CTD and flow-through system in the lab, and handle any troubleshooting issues with equipment that arise. At least with WHOI, marine technicians sail anywhere from 6-8 months out of the year. That might seem like a lot of time to most folks, but a huge benefit is they may have several weeks off at once. This makes it an attractive lifestyle to those who can handle being away from home for long periods of time and like having extended time and freedom to travel or explore their hobbies more in-depth.

More information here: https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/ships/marine-facilities-operations/marine-facilities-operations-support-services/shipboard-technicians/

One of the mates took this photo from the bridge (I’m wearing the puffy jacket)! Source: Lia (Third Mate)

09/07/23 – 09/14/23

We are currently transiting back to Woods Hole! This week, we wrapped up the remaining science objectives by recovering the last of the OOI moorings. I got to hop on the A-frame, one of the lifting cranes aboard the ship that’s hydraulically powered to assist with moving operations, to help bring in the moorings and the science instruments hosted on the cable. These moorings can get up to 2830 meters meaning the recoveries can take several hours as all that cable needs to be pulled in using a series of winches. I also helped secure some of the instruments on deck after they were taken off the cable. The ship’s deck has holes all over so that the instruments like the buoys can be bolted down. I included some more background on OOI’s mission further below.

Map of the completed survey area, including the previous moorings (#9) and the ones we just deployed (#10). Zoomed out photo next to Greenland for context. 

For personal projects, I cleaned out the computer racks on the ship with a can of aero-duster and a handheld vacuum, shadowed the OOI crew while they were pulling in the moorings and hopped on the A-frame, cleaned out the PC02 filter and learned how to use the ship’s ELOG or their online record-keeping spreadsheet, replaced the syringe on the tubing that flushes out the temperature sensors on the CTD, helped the engineers repair the LARS (Launch and Recovery System) crane for the CTD since there was a loose connection in the wires that control the magnetic limit switches for the docking head, got a tour of the engine room by one of the engineers and got to crawl around in all the nooks and crannies, added CTD waypoints to OpenCPN (maritime chart plotter software), got a walkthrough of the OOI gliders and the online interface the scientists use to communicate with their acoustic modem and Iridium satellites, practiced soldering and built a new termination ending on some practice 0.322 CTD cable wire, secured the chairs in the computer lab using bungee cords, and practiced some Python coding. I’m also editing a timelapse video of the engineers servicing one of the engines since it reached the end of its lifecycle.

QOW: What are we even doing out here, anyway? Aka the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) OOI is a collection of ocean monitoring platforms in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. For this trip, our focus is on the Global Irminger Sea Array off the southern tip of Greenland (highlighted with the arrow in the photo below). The Irminger Sea Array is part of two global arrays. The locations for the global arrays were chosen to target areas that were under-sampled based on challenging sailing conditions like high winds that make it harder for research vessels to visit and collect data. The benefit of having high latitude observations is that these areas provide key insight into ocean circulation processes which can help scientists understand large-scale processes like climate change better.

The Global Irminger Sea Array has four moorings, each of which is anchored to the seafloor. In between the moorings, gliders (autonomous underwater vehicles) move in between the moorings to fill in data gaps in between each platform. The gliders communicate to the moorings via an acoustic modem which is then transferred to OOI’s servers via a satellite. What’s really cool is these moorings also have acoustic sound releases that cause the cable to detach from the anchor so we can pick them up.

For the three subsurface moorings (labeled #1, 2, and 3), once the acoustic releases have been triggered and the mooring is released from the anchor, the crew hooks the red buoyant buoy to bring it in. At the end of the mooring are a series of green buoyant balls that help the mooring to come to the surface to relieve the strain on the ship’s winches.

For the yellow surface buoy mooring (#4), the order is in reverse: the crew has to grab the buoyant glass balls first and then finally wrangle the surface buoy once the rest of the cable has been secured. The rescue boat is deployed to attach a cable to the surface buoy to help bring it onto the ship. I included some photos showing the recovery process for both types of moorings below.

For the subsurface moorings:

The buoy comes up to the surface once the acoustic release has been triggered so the crew can hook onto it.

Then, using the A-frame and a series of winches on deck, they bring in the buoy and the rest of the mooring.

For the surface buoy:

The rescue boat is deployed so the crew can hook up a line to the surface buoy directly to help wrangle it back on the ship with two points of contact (one on the bottom as part of the mooring, then one on the buoy). Source: Croy (SSSG/Marine Technician)

Recovery of the old buoys was just one step – we had to both deploy the new moorings AND recover the old ones, all while working under a tight weather window. Suffice to say I’m amazed at all the crew and science party have pulled off!

For more information on OOI: https://oceanobservatories.org/ 

08/31/23 – 09/07/23

Prince Christian Sound

I’ve gotten in the groove of things on the ship. The OOI crew deployed the large SUMO-10 buoy along with the whole mooring system. We had a low-pressure system move in so we had to hide out in Prince Christian Sound, Greenland which was STUNNING. We hung out at the entrance of the fjord for a while before going on a glacier hunt and sailing farther into the channel. The blue streaks on the icebergs were amazing to see as they floated by. My favorite glacier was one that stopped at a cliff and had a waterfall coming over the side.

Iceberg with blue streaks cutting through, one of the glaciers we saw, view from the bridge.

As if seeing glaciers wasn’t enough, we also saw the northern lights!! On the first night, I saw what I thought was a faint cloud but it turned out to be the aurora borealis. The sky contained green clouds that night. Then the second night, which was when an incoming solar flare was predicted to happen, we saw a faint light behind the mountains that looked like light pollution you’d see on the horizon. But then the light magnified and streaks shone across the sky, wiggling like green snakes. The crew stood out on the bow and in the bridge watching the lights in the sky. The coolest part was looking straight up and seeing the streaks of light directly above you like there was an alien spaceship trying to pick you up. The lights danced across the sky, and at one point I saw streaks of red mixing in with the green as they were painted across the sky. It was a magical night. 

Aurora lights in the sky. My camera picked up more of the green light than we saw in person.

Besides geeking out over glaciers and the northern lights, I 3D printed covers for the Debubblers in the lab to block the light and reduce bacterial overgrowth in between their cleaning maintenance. I also cleaned out the PC02 filter which was full of krill, cleaned the transmissometers, cleaned the forward pump with Emily which was full of mussels and barnacles (yum), practiced Linux with MIT’s text-based adventure game Terminus, prepared the CTD for deployment as the resident “bottle fairy” and practiced radio commands to the winch operator, practiced more Linux with OverTheWire’s Bandit Wargame, refilled the deionized water containers with Milli-Q water, learned from one of the WHOI scientists about the Winkler titration method to look at dissolved oxygen in the water samples from the CTD, and continued working with the 3D printer to create feet to secure the new Cricut craft printer.

Question of the Week: What are the northern lights, and why do they form?

The northern lights, also called the aurora borealis, are an atmospheric phenomenon of dancing lights. Galileo coined the term aurora borealis after Aurora, the Roman Goddess of Dawn, and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. In the south pole, the same atmospheric effect is referred to as aurora australis, named after the Greek god of the south wind. Auroras form due to an interaction between energized particles from the sun and Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth has a magnetic field based on the way its molten, iron core circulates that redirects incoming solar particles. Energized particles from the sun hit Earth’s upper atmosphere and are deflected by this magnetic field towards the north and south poles, which then excite molecules in the atmosphere to produce a dizzying array of colors. There was green and red in the aurora I saw since the solar particles excited oxygen and nitrogen molecules, creating green and red colors respectively.

Fun fact: auroras happen on other planets too! These planets also have magnetic fields and atmospheres.

Source:

https://www.space.com/15139-northern-lights-auroras-earth-facts-sdcmp.html#section-northern-lights-faqs-answered-by-an-expert

Seljalandsfoss waterfall in Iceland 🙂

08/24/23 – 08/31/23

This week has been a whirlwind! On the 24th, I arrived to the R/V Neil Armstrong, docked in Reykjavik, Iceland. Since then, I’ve been familiarizing myself with the ship’s spaces, meeting the crew, and working on some projects. I met my mentors, Emily and Croy, who I’ll shadow for my internship. One big task the crew had to complete before sailing to Greenland was repairing the main crane. Since the seal on the inner piston for the extender arm was broken, we had to hire two cranes to hoist the crew up there and a crane to lift out the inner piston part.

Cranes to hoist the crew and the inner piston. Source: Croy

Since joining the ship, I’ve been working on side projects to support the science party. I’ve used a power drill to replace some of the rusted nails on the CTD wooden frame with stainless steel ones (aborted since the screws kept stripping as they weren’t the right type), took off the tubing from the flow-through station in the lab to clean the tubes with fresh water (and tried to remember how to put it back on), attached the CDOM (Colored Dissolved Organic Matter) fluorometer on the CTD rosette with a mounting block that Emily 3D printed, studied computer networking fundamentals and Linux, and helped prepare the CTD for a deployment and captured water samples from the Niskin bottles once the rosette came back up. Emily also taught me a nice hack to fill in stripped screw holes by breaking wooden toothpicks in the hole so the screws have something to latch onto.

In terms of life on the ship, I’ve been amazed at the variety, flavor, and amount of food on board. On my first night here, we had chocolate cake for dessert and there has been a whole spread of snacks on the counter up for grabs (Cheetos, gummy bears, candy bars!!) The food is really incredible and for me it’s a good sign to see that the ship goes above and beyond for the crew’s morale. There’s also CHEESE THIRTY, a charcuterie board that happens every day at 1530. You read that right. 

Some other cool things that happened this week was finding out my roommate had previously worked in film as part of the camera crew for television shows including the Walking Dead. I also played disc golf with Croy and company on top of a hill in Reykjavik that overlooked the city and was framed by the mountains.

For this upcoming week, the current plan is to go into Prince Christian Sound in Greenland to avoid a storm. The view there is supposed to be spectacular so I’m really looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to working more with the 3D printer. 

I wanted to dedicate this last section to questions I’ve had since joining the ship:

What is the R/V Neil Armstrong, and why is it named after the astronaut?

The R/V Neil Armstrong is an oceanographic research vessel owned by the United States Navy and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The ship was named after Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon and a Navy veteran. Naming the vessel after Armstrong harkens back to the time when the space program named their space shuttles after WHOI oceanographic sailing vessels, such as the space shuttle Atlantis named after WHOI’s R/V Atlantis. In turn, the new class of research vessels including R/V Neil Armstrong and its sister ship R/V Sally Ride with Scripps Institution of Oceanography (like the WHOI of the west coast) were named after astronauts. During The R/V Armstrong’s naming ceremony, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said:

“Naming this class of ships and this vessel after Neil Armstrong honors the memory of an extraordinary individual, but more importantly, it reminds us all to embrace the challenges of exploration and to never stop discovering.” Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus (source)

Upcoming questions:

What is the OOI Science Mission?

What does a marine technician do?

More to come 🙂

Hi everyone!

My name is Cassie Ferrante and I will be the UNOLS-MATE intern on the upcoming R/V Neil Armstrong voyage. We’re scheduled to sail from Reykjavík, Iceland to Greenland, then back home to Woods Hole, MA from the end of August through September. Our main science objective is to recover and replace the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Irminger Sea Array in an area southeast of Greenland.

Some background on me:
In 2020, I graduated from Colgate University in Upstate New York with a degree in Marine-Freshwater Science. Due to covid travel restrictions, I participated in my study abroad program after graduation. In 2021, I joined Sea Education Association’s Ocean and Climate Program, sailing from California to Hawaii. I absolutely loved sailing and couldn’t wait to get back on the water. Last year, I sailed on the NOAA R/V Okeanos Explorer as an explorer-in-training, a similar internship program to this one except more of a focus on seafloor mapping. Since then, I’ve participated in two terms with the NASA DEVELOP program in Wyoming and Alabama using NASA Earth satellite observations to address local environmental concerns. 

I’m thrilled to join the Armstrong and to meet everyone soon!! I’ll be traveling around Iceland for a few days before meeting the boat. 🙂

12/12

Final week of this internship! Despite being done with INSURV there was lots to do around the ship, many of which included cleaning up and reorganizing after the inspection. As the ship is going to be in port until the new year we took off the CTD and put it on the dock, where it will get taken away to have all its sensors calibrated. Most of the sensors need a calibration every year or every other year, and with the calibration log I worked on earlier in this internship it was clear all the sensors onboard needed calibration. 

The engineers are working on a project of their own, rebuilding one of the engines. This doesn’t overlap with the technicians at all, apart from needing to open a hatch on the starboard side deck. The hatch in question happens to be underneath the tracks for the CTD cart. So this meant for us, once we offloaded the CTD we started work on doing all the bolts for the track pieces that cover the hatch. Luckily the whole thing didn’t have to come apart, and we could get away with removing only about half of the track. 

This made for a great opportunity to pull off the gaskets beneath the tracks, they were extremely gross and caked with salt deposits, so one of my tasks of the day was scrubbing these gaskets.

My scrubbing was interrupted in the afternoon however, because of a small operation to bring the ship port-side into the dock. This was done to make life easier for the divers who were diving on the sea chest on the port side. Now, the ship can dock on either side, but they really prefer the starboard side as the decks have been designed with that in mind. This just meant for me, I had a very interesting time running the fiber internet cable from the connection on the starboard side all the way up to the focsle deck and over to the port side. Where there is a will (and enough velcro) there is a way, and soon the internet was restored! The ship will stay docked in this position while the divers complete their work over the next few weeks. 

12/13

Tuesday I finished scrubbing the gaskets for the CTD track, and I also re-labeled them so hopefully whoever has to resemble them has an easier time. After working in the morning on the gaskets, the deck crew was ready to bring on our wire baskets containing all the things we took off for the inspection, and the rest of the technician’s day was devoted to unloading the wire baskets and re-organizing everything in the hold. This proved a much more difficult task than taking everything off the ship, as we put everything back on we really tried to figure out exactly what it was, and if it was a back up that we needed to bring with us at all times. We were able to purge some extraneous equipment, but with the equipment we kept we labeled it obsessively and organized it much better than it had been. Part of being a technician aboard a ship like this, I’m learning, is keeping track of your processes and logging what you do, because you’re not on the ship all the time, the other technicians need to be able to figure out what you did during your time here.

12/14

The weather has gotten much chillier these past few days, but I found a great way of warming up, also an important one, cleaning all the hardware for the CTD track. This track is exposed on the deck to the elements and I believe the technician said it had been taken apart last year, only a year later it is already caked with salt and corrosion, as you would expect. My great task was standing over a sink running very hot water to clean all of the bolts and plates used to secure the track to the deck. This allowed me to stay in the relative warmth of the wet lab over a nice steaming bucket of bolts. Most bolts only needed cleaning with a wire brush, but some plates used to keep the track together needed some extra care with a wire wheel attachment on a drill.

Cleaning these little pieces took up most of my day, until we were informed about a delivery of a new lithium cabinet. This cabinet was deemed necessary by the Shoreside people as we have many tools that use lithium batteries. The battery containment unit is on wheels, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know that this ship rocks quite a bit, so a good part of the cabinets design is that it is intended to be able to put fires out on its own. As I understand it, the battery is placed inside the cabinet where the fire suppression system keeps it at bay. Of course, hopefully we never need to find out!

12/15

Thursday began very windy and rainy which was unfortunate for the new printers that have been delivered to the ship. They were out of their boxes already but wrapped with shrink wrap, so we believe not too much water got in, however these new printers are not the ship board technicians job to install. As I understand it Shoreside support will send people to install the printers, leaving us free to pursue other tasks today.

Emily and I moved on to removing some plumbing from the port side and contaminated sea water pump, which is all the way up in the bow thruster room. The corrosion on the plumbing for this pump was quite severe, and it took both of us to pry the pieces in question off. Once we got the pieces off, we sent them down to the deck crew for needle gunning and painting.

The next task of the day was taking apart the motor for the CTD track, which had suffered the same fate as the track itself (very corroded). An interesting detail about this motor is it appears to have as many as three different types of metal used on it, one of them being aluminum. We did finally get the motor apart from the driving gear, and the pictures will tell you how difficult it was!

12/16

Here we are at last, the final day of this internship. Unfortunately for you readers, it wasn’t the most thrilling of days, finishing up an internship like this has a lot of paperwork involved. Luckily it was a rainy day and no one was working outside anyways.

I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog, and keeping up with my adventures! This internship has meant so much more to me than I could’ve imagined two months ago.

As I wrap this blog up, I can now say that part of the reason I had so much paperwork to do on Friday was not only the combination of the internship’s paperwork, but also I began the process of new employee paperwork! I feel so lucky and privileged to say that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has hired me on as a casual technician for the Armstrong. This will allow me to train with this ship’s systems a whole lot more and I will be joining them on a few cruises in the 2023 schedule. While I won’t be blogging those experiences, this internship has definitely reinforced the importance of noting everything that I’m doing, because the time really does fly!

12/5 

We began the week with three days left until the INSURV inspection, and everyone was running in high gear! In the morning I added the final coats of paint to the bullseye on the platform and Emily and I started working on fixing the gaskets for the CTD platform track. The track goes over several deck plates and hatches, and the gasket eventually gets displaced as the ship rocks. Putting it back into place just meant undoing the bolts holding the track, and (professionally) shoving the gasket back under. This also gave us an opportunity to work on the track itself, grinding down any corrosion and aligning the track pieces better. This, along with the motor rebuild Emily did last week means the CTD cart has never moved smoother! 

As rain came in for the afternoon, I shadowed Sonia as she updated any out of date workstations, which can be a delicate process for some machines that operate a specific version of Windows or Ubuntu. This is not a quick project so we busied ourselves with other minor projects for the rest of the afternoon while also babysitting the computers.

The weekend had a slight glum, after the cold weather and only short trips around town my car was dead! We went to the front desk of the Smith Laboratories to borrow a work truck to jumper it and the security guard there said “I’ll do you one better” Thanks!

12/6

The rain continued into Tuesday so we all continued inside projects, most of which included continuing computer updates and cleaning, yay! I worked off and on between checking for security updates on computers to cleaning down in the transducer room. The transducer room is vast so some deckies were cleaning down there also. They painted and dusted while I cleaned off all the tops of the transducers and transducer equipment, and also scraped off tons of excess masking tape on pipes. 

The big success of the day was removing the tape from the CTD platform, finally revealing my masterpiece, the bullseye!

This process was challenging for me technically to combine all my skills recreating the pieces and fitting them together, and then artistically painting the bullseye in Rustoleum so that it could be seen from the winch operator’s booth (since that’s who this is for, so the winch operators have something to aim for). Overall I think it came out great, and it gives everyone a laugh when they walk by!

We finished the day at the tech’s weekly meeting in person, where everyone wished us luck on the upcoming inspection. 

12/7

Final day before INSURV! The morning started with meetings for the SSSGs and then frantically finishing up all projects. For me this included a final round of cleaning in the labs and staring hard at all the SSSG spaces, trying to find things that had been missed. The crew worked so hard preparing for this inspection, the ship is looking spotless! 

I fine tuned my little bolt cover for the CTD, as the last one was too small by about 0.5 mm. This proved an exercise in frustration as the 3D printer decided for half my prints to stick, and half of them to unstick part way through. The machine cant be blamed for this (as much as I’d like to) and it just keeps printing as if nothing happened, leaving you with a wonderful ball of filament spaghetti in the end. Eventually I printed enough good ones to attach. 

12/8

Everyone woke early for even more last-minute preparations, but before we knew it, we had almost twenty Navy guys onboard setting up in the mainlab. In the briefing before we set out from the dock the Navy commander gave us a run down of which departments would work with which inspectors. They also explained that this team solely does inspections, moving around the country doing all the Navy ships. The techs were assigned one inspector who specialized in IT and the process began! 

We departed the dock at the 1030 slack tide, with plans to steam down into Vineyard sound for the propulsion tests. The INSURV inspector followed us around as Emily and Sonia explained how the network is set up onboard and answered his questions about the servers and router(s). It was very interesting to hear him compare the Armstrong to other Navy ships, we must seem tiny! The Navy guys were especially impressed with the food, complementing the stewards endlessly. The tech inspection finished quickly after he checked out all the server racks and printers, then we were free to lay low until our next test. 

After lunch the techs gathered back for a CTD cast, which was quite short because we were only in about 25 meters of water. The goal was just to demonstrate the operation of the LARS arm that deployed the CTD, and this was also a test for the termination I did, luckily the CTD operated well and my termination held! (losing the CTD in front of the Navy might have been the subject of my nightmares)

This concluded the inspection for the techs, and we got to relax a bit while the deck crew did more operations on the way back for slack tide at 1545. After buttoning everything up for the night, it was time to get some rest for the last part of the inspection tomorrow!

12/9

The INSURV team was back bright and early, continuing with the rest of the engineering checks at the dock. The techs hung out for any questions that might come up, but the only ones were helping the team connect to the wifi. The team then left before lunch without much fanfare, but during the crew debrief we were told just how well we scored and then the celebrations began. Overall the Navy sounded very impressed with the ship and especially the crew! 

I spent the afternoon fixing the only thing the tech department got dinged on, which was missing screws from the server racks, and easy fix. I then moved onto investigating an ethernet cable that had stopped transmitting, apart from the crusty corrosion on the termination, another bad sign was when I cut the cable and water started dripping out. Sonia helped me to find a replacement cable to run and I re-terminated the end to fit where it needed to. While we aren’t sure how the water got in the cable, the sun was setting and I lost the light to finish the project. 

Weekend plans no longer include a short cruise, as the wave conditions were forecasted to be rough. This just means we have a more relaxed window to set back up after INSURV. Another disappointing note is we wont be installing the new ADCP transducer this week either. While we had the transducer itself onboard, the parts for the elevator needed to lower it through the sea chest are not ready yet, so the project has been tentatively moved to February. I am disappointed of course, this install promised to be a great learning experience involving multiple departments onboard, working together to install a transducer without taking the ship to dry-dock. However I know Emily has other projects we can dive into this coming week! 

This by no means leaves us bereft of projects for this last week! INSURV gave us an opportunity to purge and clean, and this has unearthed several projects to keep me nice and occupied. 

11/28

    We woke after the Thanksgiving holiday with a full crew again and lots of things to do! The techs first task was to test the .322 cable used for the CTD. This testing involved the use of a Megger instrument to test each wire within the cable for insulation resistance and a few other things.

The insulation resistance (as the name implies) measures how well insulated the wire in question is, and this mainly tells us how damaged each wire is. The techs test the cable before and after cutting it each time for re-termination, and the results compared to each other are how they gauge the health of the cable. A high insulation resistance reading means the cable is performing well, and a low reading (especially compared to a previous reading) means its probably time to re-terminate. 

    The techs re-terminate this highly-used cable about every six months or so, so when our readings were complete and to no one’s surprise, the numbers were a bit low, Sonia handed me the angle grinder and had me cut the cable. 

(The new end, taped up and ready for re-termination later this week!)

    We then all moved onto one of the biggest tasks, removing the hatch from the science hold to empty the space of all the SSSG equipment. The hatch was unbolted and wire baskets were lowered down!

We ended up filling five baskets with secondary and backup equipment! It took most of the afternoon but in the end it was great to get this task done at the beginning of the week while we were very motivated! 

11/29

    The weather prevented some outdoor operations, so we worked on inside projects like securing the cable runs in each lab space and taking down even more unnecessary runs. 

    The biggest excitement of the day was a run to Home Depot! Sonia and I used one of the WHOI trucks available to employees, (since the plywood we needed definitely wouldn’t fit in my car) and drove up to get some 2x4s and sheets of plywood to build a new platform for the CTD cart. Construction on that project will begin tomorrow!

11/30

    I began the long process of cutting all the pieces for the new platform. I use the term long, not because I had trouble cutting all the pieces out, but because all the pieces had to be fitted to their individual spots on the cart frame as I discovered none were interchangeable. Once I had all the pieces cut out I used an orbital sander to fine-tune the pieces and bevel the edges to fit close to the frame’s weld seams. This maybe was not the ‘proper’ tool for the job but with the roughest grit sandpaper I could make sure each piece fit perfectly without hefting a large saw around. 

    During the day most of the crew was occupied for an ABS (American Bureau of Shipping) inspection, the first inspection group to start our battery of inspections in the coming week. To stay out of their way we fitted all the pieces of the cart in and screwed them down, before adding the plywood and ensuring the new platform was stable. Unfortunately we had to take the platform apart for the next step in my process, paint!

12/1

    Today’s inspection was from the Coast Guard, so the techs again tried to stay out of the way by spending the morning securing more cable runs. If this sounds repetitive by now just remember I can only cut so many zip ties in a day before needing to move on to another project! Also you might be shocked at the sheer amount of cabling on a ship! 

    On a lighter note I was given a full tutorial on how to access the 3D printer onboard wirelessly and also spent time today fine-tuning my designs for parts the engineers wanted us to print. These were the outlet covers and end caps, and after a few re-designs I had two functional parts that can now be printed on-demand when they are noticed to be missing. 

    The only part of the inspection the techs were expected to participate in were the drills, these being a fire and an abandon ship drill. As we have practiced before, at the sound of the alarm we gathered our immersion suits (no one needed to put any on this time, thankfully) and life jackets and mustered ourselves in the main lab. A key to mustering for a drill is (in colder months) DRESSING FOR THE WEATHER OUTSIDE. When I got onboard it was stressed heavily in a real emergency at cold temperatures, evacuating in flimsy clothes and then freezing to death anyways was not the goal. The coast guard in a debrief later praised us all for being so prepared. 

    After the drill I embarked on the final step of the new CTD platform, the paint! This is an attempt to keep the platform from degrading with the repeated saltwater it gets on it. I say attempt here because we all know trying to keep saltwater out of places to prevent rot or rust is almost always an exercise in futility. In the spirit of trying to keep the wood from turning green and rotting beneath the CTD the techs told me to try painting it to seal it a bit more. After some research we learned that some types of paint we already had onboard, namely the Rustoleum, could also be used on wood! 

    This led us to conclude that the easiest and most efficient way of getting this platform done was to use that paint. I began by giving the plywood a light sanding with my friend the orbital sander, and going over the boards with a cloth to sweep all the dust away. I then covered both sides of each board with the Rustoleum primer, leaving them to dry for more paint tomorrow!

12/2

    Happy Friday! Thankfully we didn’t have any inspections today so I jumped right in with the first coat of white on the platform boards. I was told to let this dry for longer as the paint interacts with its primer and the interaction could be interesting because it was on wood. 

    Emily and I then moved on to one of the biggest tasks of this internship, learning that all-important skill of CTD cable terminating! We peeled back the layers of the cable, starting with the shielding layers that also act as ground, taking them back about two feet to have enough of the wires to work with. The cable has two layers of steel shielding which also acts as the cable’s ground, so two strands of this were preserved for attaching to the green ground plug. From here was standard wire terminating, stripping the wire, and blending the wire from the cable into the wire to its respective plug.

Emily then got down to showing me how to solder the wires together without burning the casing, then running layers of self-fusing tape, before adding final layers of vinyl electrical tape. This is done for all three wires encased within the CTD cable, then we added the ground connection which didn’t require soldering. All 4 of these new connections were wrapped with even more tape to attempt to keep as much water out as possible. 

    Both techs stressed that terminating this cable is something done often onboard research vessels, and every tech will have their own way of doing it. 

    We finished up the termination and celebrated! Many people were going home for the weekend so the next few days will be focused on indoor projects and organization. 

 

 

11/19

Morning operations were successful as the mooring group recovered the last small coastal profile buoy, with its accompanying sensors and anchor. They also recovered an anchor that was left behind from last week. The wind picked up to a constant 30 knots and our destination that day had us steaming into the waves and pounding down for most of the afternoon. This influx of bubbles under the hull is a very big problem to say the least, as it disrupts the ship’s array of transducers. Not only transducers though, the constant supply of sea water being pumped for the main lab supply and to run through some other instruments was heavily disrupted by all the slamming. Emily and I worked to troubleshoot the PCO2 sensor which seemed to have an array of issues stemming from the interruptions in flow. We initially thought we were successful by replacing a drip sensor that had become corroded, but the system kept emergency stopping itself and the drip sensor was not the biggest problem. 

The evening was taken up by a battery of CTD casts, where we would steam (pound) north for half an hour, and then go out on deck and launch the CTD while trying not to get pummeled by waves coming over the side. In between casts I emptied and organized the cabinet in the HIPAP area, which was suffering from poor labeling and the internal lights for the cabinet were low on charge, making it very difficult to find anything. Many (most) things in there were networking pieces of technology I had never seen before, so I did have to bring Sonia in several times for the game of, ‘what is this and do we need to keep it onboard?’ This cleaning also doubled as a purging of equipment in time for the INSURV inspection, where anything superfluous will be removed from the ship. In the end, I was very pleased with the results!

(Also here is the promised CTD bolt cover final print!)

11/20

    The weather remained the same but the CTD casts were done in daylight today, which gave you more light to see the waves crashing onto the deck! 

    The evening brought a break from CTDs, as the EK80 was turned on for a long transect survey. Meanwhile Sonia started me on a coding journey, first showing me some resources to learn the basics, then setting me up with a virtual computer to test out what I was learning. This was lovingly titled “Intern Playground”, and it’s a place for me to get comfortable with a system similar to the ship’s, while also being safe from killing any of the ship’s systems.

11/21

    The weather gave us a break for the ROV operations, but not before giving us another taste of a bumpy night. Everyone was extremely motivated to finish up though, and the first dive of the day brought up the anchor claimed by the crabs last week. 

    The SSSGs had many meetings concerning an upcoming cruise in December, new ideas for upgrading the email system for the WHOI ships, and the upcoming ADCP installation after INSURV. These meetings ended just in time for us to go back into the main lab and watch Chris snag the final stubborn anchor. This one had fired off it’s linepack, but it had snagged somewhere on the way to the surface, so he had extra line to avoid getting tangled in with the ROV. This final anchor meant the last of deck operations, and the ship turned north to head back home. There were a planned group of CTD casts along the way, but the weather had turned against our favor and by the middle of the night, CTD casts were called off.

11/22

    No one got much sleep as the ship rocked and rolled its way back to port. I was personally attacked by all the items on my desk, in my vanity when it swung open and emptied all contents, and my desk chair when they all went flying during various rolls. I did not, however, fall out of my top bunk, which is an accomplishment. 

    No sleep and a bumpy ride makes for a low-spirited crew, but everyone was bolstered by the fact that we accomplished all of the OOI array goals, picking up all of the equipment and doing many CTD casts and surveys along the way. We came into the dock at WHOI around 0900 and quickly the deck and science crew began unloading. 

    As with the last demobilization days, the SSSGs mainly stick to going through end_cruise  work, moving data to the correct places and shutting systems down. This involved the techs all together to figure out what was wrong with the PCO2 sensor. In the end it was a drip sensor that kept stopping the system, but because with all the air in the systems from the ride, the pressure differences caused spontaneous releases of sea water in weak places in the tubing system.  

    The end of the OOI cruise doesn’t mean an end to the work, as now we can fully turn our attention to the INSURV inspection. This meant for these days leading up to the holiday, zip ties were our best friend, as we have to secure all cable runs. This is just one of the many steps for the SSSGs before INSURV, and all other departments on board will be working through the next week and a half painting, cleaning and securing.

11/23

    Our first full day back on shore was a busy one as the demobilization efforts continued. All the moorings and associated equipment are removed, as none of it can stay for the inspection. Speaking of inspections, many different aspects of the ship need to be looked at, including the fume hoods in the lab spaces, and the hull itself, as we had snagged a lobster pot on our bow thruster on the way back. (No there weren’t any lobsters, we asked.) The divers also exercised the bolts on the sea chest plate. You may say this sounds like a lot of exercising for this project, but they take opening holes in the ship very seriously. For our purposes we aren’t opening a gaping hole to be exact, but the outside plate of the sea chest will need to be removed if we are to install a transducer on an elevator and don’t want to hear it go ‘bump’ on first deployment. 

    On the topic of the new ADCP transducer, one of the scientists on the team stopped by in the afternoon, and the techs met with her to discuss the install. For a few days the team had been emailing back and forth about an issue with the cable bend. After discussing many solutions over Zoom, this scientist who visited agreed that the cable bend was not ideal, but likely workable, as the instrument is only planned to be onboard the ship for a year of at-sea testing. For us this means we can continue with the installation plans, as again, we can’t start this project and have it unfinished during INSURV, so it must be started directly after.

11/24

    Happy Thanksgiving! I am fortunate to be spending the holiday weekend at home, and I hope everyone has a great holiday and eats lots of good food!

I did bring a small project home with me, modeling out two more small parts, one to cover a missing outlet (think a protector you have for a baby, but for a hollow outlet strip) and the end cap for those strips of outlets. I will update progress on the parts next week!

11/12

    After steaming all night up to Martha’s Vineyard and stopping to do CTD casts the whole way, we arrived to a beautiful day dawning in the Vineyard. It was a rolly steam through the night, so as this was a day off the OOI site, many people (including me) rested and caught up on sleep. 

11/13

    After the storm passed, we steamed back to the site. I worked on odd jobs around the ship while the rough seas prevented the scientists from doing any work. In the main lab there are several power strips mounted which needed to be replaced with ones that the Navy approved, and down in the science storeroom there was a lot of organization of the cables and spare nickin bottles that was badly needed.

(I realize I dont always post a before and after to the organization I’m doing, but it’s just too many pictures, so just trust me when I say it looks a whole lot better)

In the afternoon Emily and I touched base on what I’ve learned so far that I’m feeling strong about, and what I would like to learn more of. In the next few weeks I would like to delve deeper into the computers that run all the ship’s various transducers and how they all interact with each other, as this is essential for understanding a huge portion of the tech work done onboard. 

    Later in the afternoon during a calm spell the science crew launched a small drifter off the stern. The little drifter is named “Lady Lance” and the original has already made the transit from the US to Ireland. Students at a local school have built a sister to the original boat, decorated it, and mounted a new GPS tracker to watch as the currents hopefully take the boat back across the Atlantic.

The evening hours were filled with more CTD casts, where the team and I running them were feeling good despite the rough conditions. This was only made better by the display of white-sided dolphins, who were feasting on a school of small fish right next to the ship. As we did our casts the dolphins put on quite a show! I ended up getting splashed from the waist down on one of the last casts of the night but I couldn’t feel very upset about it because of how amazing it was seeing the dolphins!

(the best picture I could get)

11/14 

    My schedule for this week has been a bit wonky, so lately I have been skipping breakfast and getting up for lunch. This morning however I heard a great commotion in the hall. I learned later this was a stow-away drill going on, and the crew and scientists were gleefully hunting down a single engineer who had been chosen to act as the ‘stow-away’. 

    In the afternoon the scientists had scheduled another mooring recovery, and Emily and I geared up and headed out to watch the operation. The bosun was good enough to let me run the A-frame, which turned out to be uncomplicated, but very fun to operate. For this operation the scientists had brought their own winches, so all I was doing on the A-frame was raising the mooring on the pulley attached to the center of the A-frame and then lowering it on deck. Of course it’s never just the mooring, and we stayed through the whole operation collecting the subsurface flotation, profiler and anchor. 

    Speaking of anchors, the science crew was also gearing up today for the ROV operation to recover the anchor that was stuck, as the weather was only supposed to improve more. Sonia and I tested the Sonardyne nano transponders, of which the scientists have two, by charging them up and strapping them to the CTD, and sending them down with the cast. We lowered the USBL pole and were able to track them as they descended. This obviously is a good idea, as no one wants to deploy the ROV and not be able to track its position during the operation. All was well there and as we only had a few casts to do this evening, I turned my attention to other projects. 

    The ship is full of cameras to monitor the systems and machinery, and the camera in the transducer room had apparently not been working for a while, so I went down to check it out. I determined the camera wasn’t working because it wasn’t plugged in. But how to plug it in? The camera is mounted to the ceiling of the transducer room and the ceiling is perhaps 15 feet high… and I am very short comparatively. Even standing on the tallest transducer I am still lacking the height to work on the camera, more to come on this project as we figure out how to get up there. 

    To feel productive after I couldn’t make progress on the camera project, I spent a good chunk of the evening organizing the ‘random hardware’ drawer in the science storeroom. I sorted through all the bits and bolts, and now the drawer is ready for new dividers to keep everything organized and accessible. Now on an organizing streak, I waited for the main lab to clear out of scientists for the night and then organized the drawer of tools in there. This may all sound like typical intern work, but I actually appreciate it not only for the satisfaction, but also with how it forces me to be familiar with the layout of the ship. 

    At the end of the night Sonia gave me a run through of the Ksync system, which is just a computer program to sync multiple transducers to ping at intervals where they won’t interfere with each other. The main culprit here is the EK80, which is very susceptible to interference from other instruments, so much so that we ask the bridge to turn off some of their speed and wave tracking instruments while the EK80 survey is underway. The Ksync program will take control of all the instruments and time each to ping sequentially. This ensures the best quality of data from the EK80, which gives the most fascinating look at the water column! The scientists explained the data we were seeing was different water currents as they flowed near to each other, but different enough in temperature and salinity they weren’t mixing. It doesn’t hurt either that the data is shown in rainbow colors, so it’s very visually appealing.

11/15

    I woke up for the big event of the trip, the ROV operation to recover the mooring anchor that was lost earlier when the recovery line broke. During the night we steamed in a rectangle for an ADCP survey, and then stayed on station above the last location of the anchor until time to launch the ROV after breakfast. We had a perfect day, with only 1.5 meter waves and calm winds. The techs don’t have a ton to do directly with this operation, but as usual they act in a support capacity, ensuring the video feeds from the ROV go to the correct places and the USBL pole is deployed so the Sonardyne Nano transponders can talk to the ship. Something that I didn’t know about this specific ROV is that it is made by Saab! The OOI group use it with another contraption called a ‘parking meter’ and each has a nano transponder so operators onboard can know the exact location of both. The parking meter is used as a spool for the line used to attach to the anchor, and also to take the tension off the ROV itself. The ROV then has about 25 meters of cable to explore, and if more exploration is necessary, once the ROV and parking meter are at depth the whole ship can move to let the ROV then drift into a better position. 

    The mission went well and the anchor was found close to the last known waypoint. It was amazing to watch the ROV go down to nearly 500 meters, through darkness and particles of organic matter and see the anchor sitting on the bottom! The ROV clipped on to the anchor, and despite protests from some crabs, made its way back to the surface for recovery. However when attempting to recover the anchor with the newly attached line, the clip came loose, and so we started the whole operation again in the afternoon. It seems those crabs were very fond of that anchor!

    Funnily enough (but not for the ROV team) after finding the anchor again in the afternoon and clipping on, the same thing happened. It was a common joke that the crabs had been unclipping us because they made the anchor their home. Whatever the issue, we couldn’t stay on site anymore, and at 1900 we began our steam north back to WHOI. With the weather we no longer have two to three days in port for demobilization before leg two, now we are coming in for just shy of 24 hours and leaving again on Thursday. 

11/16

    The day began early, arriving at the dock around 0930 and immediately the deck crew began offloading the mooring equipment. The techs mostly stay out of the way of these deck operations except for the important task of connecting to shore internet! Emily then walked me through several of the end-cruise computer tasks like ensuring the data collected is copied to the correct places and everything is turned off and logged as so. As we did this a diver came and dove on a sea-chest where they will be installing a new transducer in a few weeks. The ship is not going to dry-dock, since it has a few spare sea-chests with no transducers installed, we can put this one in without having to pull the ship out of the water. The diver was investigating how difficult it would be to take the bolts off the plate covering the sea-chest, and after he was done we went down and exercised the seacock, which seemed to turn very well (we had expected the valve to be frozen and possibly immovable). 

    We took a field trip to shore to collect various parts and tools we ordered in the past week, and also a surprise! The new transducer that we will be installing was waiting for us! The transducer has been in a lab being tested, and has now finally come aboard to be mounted. The issue is the transducers need to be mounted below the ship’s hull, and obviously we cant do that without going to dry-dock. The solution to this is mounting the transducer on an elevator attached to the sea-chest. When everything is installed and working properly, the seacock can be opened and the transducer can be deployed down below the hull via the elevator, similar to how the USBL pole operates. 

    One of the tech gurus from shore then came aboard to demonstrate how we test the transducers for the various instruments. This is a long and frustrating process, as each instrument has multiple transducers for sending and receiving signals, and each must be plugged in and tested individually. The testing today was just an example of what we would eventually do to all of them, and after some issues were found with the computer connected to the transducer tester, we determined this was not a project for the limited hours we were in port between these legs, and moved on to other projects. 

    Emily and I then joined a meeting on zoom about this transducer we would be putting in. It was really good to finally put faces to names I’d been seeing in email chains! The meeting was mainly focused on the logistics of installing the transducer elevator, which is in the process of being machined out and will need to fit down a narrow shaft to the transducer room to be assembled. As you might imagine, the dimensions of the shaft and the weight of the parts are the major limiting factors, as well as the fact that the ship is still slated for a Navy INSURV inspection in early December. This means we can’t begin the installation project until the inspection is finished, shortening our install time window significantly. For me it will be an excellent opportunity to help the techs on a larger project that involves many aspects of WHOI personnel. 

    We saved the best project for last, testing the new workboat! This was a very essential project which for the techs, involved getting in the old workboat to provide a comparison to the new one. Safe to say, the new workboat has twin 120 hp outboards, while the old one has twin 60 hp outboards… I’ll let you guess which boat won! 

(For those of you wondering, no they didnt let the intern drive the expensive, new workboat, not until the Captains got to test it out! Maybe next week in port!)

11/17

    Our time of departure this morning was scheduled to be 0950, but the mates onboard  the ship must perform Gear tests within 12 hours of coming into or leaving port. Today I was invited up to the bridge to run through the tests with our 2nd mate, Chris. The gear test just involves a full test of all maneuvering devices, from the engines to the thrusters, and a test of all the control stations on the bridge, of which there are three, center and each side station. He was able to explain some more of the ship’s systems, including the DP (dynamic positioning) system used to keep the ship in place within a few meters of a specified position. This means that the ship hardly ever has to anchor! 

    As we left the dock for this second leg of the OOI cruise, I finished washing all the plumbing for the transmissometer and PCO2 instruments, which will get gunked up after only a week or so of running. We are again running the stern diaphragm pump for the uncontaminated sea water as the scientists don’t want the creatures taken up by the pump to be in pieces. 

    My schedule for this week’s leg will be similar to last week’s leg, and I went down for a nap to wake up in time for dinner and the night’s first CTD casts. The casts for this week involve much more time, as these scientists are collecting massive amounts of water samples. We had about 90 minutes between stations, perfect chunks of time to work on this blog! 

11/18

    The first full day of this second leg opened with CTD casts early in the morning, thankfully there were enough scientists who got up which meant I didn’t have to. They also started mooring retrievals early so by the time I got up they were on their second retrieval of the day and had already had an anchor release malfunction. The weather for the coming week is looking windy and turbulent (spicy), which will make ROV operations difficult or impossible depending on the severity. This has caused a majority of the cruise to be left to day-by-day planning, and sometimes hour-by-hour changes. The scientists have set objectives, such as recovering all the small coastal profiler buoys and anchors, along with all their set CTD cast waypoints, and all of these events are now up in the air schedule-wise.

    As we steamed out to a different station for more CTD casts and samples Emily set me to designing and printing my first part on the 3D printer. This has always been a fascination of mine and I’m so excited to start learning how to print things! My first lessons in 3D printing went something like these:

Errors in printing can come in many forms, starting with your design and ending with the printer itself, so mistakes are practically inevitable. I was attempting to make a small cover for a bolt on the CTD where a lanyard for one of the niskin bottles gets caught some of the time. The final version is printing as I get ready to post this blog, so you will be updated next week hopefully with the part in place!