It's kind of a small sign. By the time another vehicle got close enough to read it, I suspect it would be too late to avoid an accident.IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU'RE FAR TOO DEEP
“Twelve men have walked on the surface of the moon and maybe 500 have traveled to space, but only two have visited the very deepest point of the ocean, which they reached on January 23, 1960.”posted by memebake at 2:43 PM on March 25, 2012 [6 favorites]
Of even greater concern than the camera was what surrounded it. "The housing for the camera was a titanium cylinder, about three feet long and ten inches in diameter," explained Cameron. "[Brother] Mike [Cameron] was into underwater photography, understood it well, and he got together with some other experts in the field to create the four-inch-thick borosilicate glass dome ports that we would have to shoot through, because the pressure at the depth we were going to be was 6,500 pounds per square inch. Multiply that by the number of square inches of glass in the front port for the camera, and you get 1.1 million pounds of pressure on a piece of glass nine and a half inches in diameter. Under those circumstances, the consequences of the glass failing were extreme - because if it did water would race down inside of the tube, probably exceeding hypersonic velocity before it reached the back of the housing, and demolish the camera down to a molecular level. Worse, the stainless steel end cap would then blow off with the kinetic energy of a cannon shell and go right through the sphere of the submarine. So our lives depended on that glass not shattering. My brother's advice to me was, 'Don't ever have the back end of the housing pointing towards the sub.' And my response was: 'Mike, the back of the housing is always going to be pointing the toward the sub, because the camera's going to be pointing away from the sub. That's the whole idea!'"Big brass ones, this man has.
Okay, now when are we gonna get a vain obsessed individual rich enough to single-handedly go back to the Moon?Mars is where Elon Musk wants to retire. Moon landing capability too, sure, but for an extended stay destination you want easier access to CO2, nitrogen and water.
I remember Dr Robert Ballard, the scientist who found the remains of the Titanic, mentioning on Colbert Report that one year of NASA's budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years, and that we have more detailed maps of Mars than we have of our own seas.Sure, but mars isn't covered in thousands of feet of optically impenetrable water. You can get maps of mars just by looking at it
Kudos to the unnamed engineers who designed and built the thing, and the grad students who will analyze the data.I'm sure the people who built this thing are probably well known in engineering circles.
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posted by radwolf76 at 2:28 PM on March 25, 2012 [7 favorites]