Special Scientific Equipment for the Submersibles

Abstract

The majority of the manned underwater vehicles in use at the present time for commercial and scientific purposes are usually equipped with instruments which are standard equipment for the contemporary submersible. Such equipment includes navigation and communication systems, video and photo equipment, manipulators, underwater lights and others. But scientific submersibles should be equipped with special instrumentation. This specific combination of instruments depends on the specific scientific purposes for which the vehicles will be used. At the present time submersibles are used mostly in some narrow fields of the oceanographic research and therefore are equipped with corresponding instruments as required. Such a narrow specialization is connected with small space facility within the submersibles and correspondingly small space for instrumentation. Only a small part of contemporary submersibles can be used for the conducting of complex oceanographic research. This report describes the instrument suite of the PISCES type submersible owned by the Institute of Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The scientific equipment consists of sensors for measurement of temperature, conductivity of seawater, depth, speed of current in three coordinates, sound velocity in water, oxygen dissolved in water, transducers for side scan sonar, and sub-bottom profiler. The signals from all sensors enter the inputs of the data acquisition system that has 24 input channels: 16 analog and 8 digital. The information from the output of the data acquisition system is recorded on video tape in digital form in conjunction with the signal from underwater TV cameras. The control for the data is made on the screen of the TV monitor during the measurements. The processing of information from the video tape is made on support ships with a 21 MX Hewlett Packard computer. The submersible has an acoustic navigation system that pemits calculation of the position of the vehicles relative to three bottom transponders. One of the improvements of the system is the possibility for the pilot to see the position of the submersible relative to three bottom transponders on a CRT- display during an operation. The instrument suite described above is installed on two PISCES submersibles. The first experimental results of scientific investigations of this equipment will be reported at the conference.