Inexpensive seafloor-hopping submersibles could stoke deep-sea science—and mining
Inexpensive seafloor-hopping submersibles could stoke deep-sea science—and mining
廉价的海底跳跃式潜水器或将推动深海科学研究与矿产开发
Smack dab between Australia and South America, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel Rainier is currently on a mission to map more than 8,000 square nautical miles of the Pacific seafloor in search of critical mineral deposits. But it isn’t doing it alone; for a month starting this week, it will deploy two oblong neon submersibles as the project’s special agents, sending them nearly 6,000 meters down to hop along the seafloor.
在美国国家海洋和大气管理局（NOAA）的“雷尼尔号”（Rainier）研究船上，科考人员目前正位于澳大利亚和南美洲之间的海域，执行一项测绘超过8000平方海里太平洋海底的任务，旨在寻找关键矿产资源。但它并非孤军奋战：从本周开始，该项目将部署两台长条形的霓虹色潜水器作为“特工”，将它们送往近6000米深的海底，在那里进行跳跃式移动。
The submersibles, built by the young company Orpheus Ocean, are designed to explore just this environment: a squelchy substrate that teems with life of all kinds, from tiny microbes to worms and snails, along with egg-size “nodules” of metals—such as copper, cobalt, nickel, and manganese—that are crucial for technologies worldwide. Scientists and companies have long sought to probe the deep sea and bring such treasures to the surface. Orpheus, which spun off from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2024, could be well positioned to make those possibilities a lot more economical.
这些潜水器由初创公司Orpheus Ocean制造，专为探索此类环境而设计：这里有着充满各种生命的泥泞基质，从微小的微生物到蠕虫和蜗牛应有尽有，此外还有鸡蛋大小的金属“结核”——如铜、钴、镍和锰，这些都是全球科技产业至关重要的原材料。科学家和企业长期以来一直寻求探测深海并将这些宝藏带回地表。Orpheus公司于2024年从伍兹霍尔海洋研究所（WHOI）分拆出来，其定位恰好能让这些探索活动变得更加经济实惠。
The company has designed its vehicles on a simple philosophy: “deep for cheap,” says Jake Russell, Orpheus’s cofounder and CEO, who is a chemist by training. The vehicles cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars each to build, whereas existing options can range from $5 million to $10 million. And unlike most autonomous ocean vehicles, they can push into the seafloor and capture cores of sediment—and the creatures within.
该公司以一种简单的理念设计了其潜水器：“低成本深潜”，Orpheus的联合创始人兼首席执行官、化学家出身的杰克·拉塞尔（Jake Russell）说道。每台潜水器的制造成本仅为几十万美元，而现有的同类设备价格则在500万至1000万美元之间。与大多数自主海洋航行器不同，它们能够深入海底并采集沉积物岩芯，以及其中的生物样本。
Orpheus’s engineers have been tinkering with their deep-sea designs for years, much of the work taking place at WHOI and in collaboration with NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Its prototype vehicles were rated capable of diving to 11,000 meters—the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. They’ve completed two commercial deployments, but this new expedition marks the submersibles’ biggest test yet: operating over large ranges for multiple weeks and with multiple instruments at play.
Orpheus的工程师们多年来一直在打磨其深海设计，大部分工作是在WHOI完成的，并与NOAA及美国国家航空航天局（NASA）进行了合作。其原型机被评估具备下潜至11000米深度的能力，即马里亚纳海沟的最深处。它们已经完成了两次商业部署，但这次新的考察标志着这些潜水器面临的最大考验：在数周时间内进行大范围作业，并同时操作多种仪器。
Using Rainier as their home base on the ocean’s surface, the vehicles will swim out for 10 kilometers at a time, taking one high-resolution image every second and up to eight physical samples from the seafloor apiece. If all goes well, the test could help establish the vehicles as a tool for government agencies, scientists, and companies that hope to probe the vastly understudied deep sea and the resources it holds. And while they’re not the only option on the market, Orpheus hopes their size and low building cost will soon make them one of the most accessible.
以海面的“雷尼尔号”为基地，这些潜水器每次将游出10公里，每秒拍摄一张高分辨率图像，并各自从海底采集多达八个物理样本。如果一切顺利，这次测试将有助于确立这些潜水器作为政府机构、科学家和企业探测深海及其资源的重要工具，而深海目前仍处于研究严重不足的状态。虽然它们并非市场上唯一的选择，但Orpheus希望凭借其体积优势和低廉的制造成本，使其很快成为最易于获取的深海探测设备之一。
At present, to reach these depths scientists must wait for time on a limited and expensive set of submersibles owned by government agencies and research institutes. That formula lends itself better to capturing snapshots of the deep sea than it does to probing its interconnected ecological and biogeochemical systems. “A lot of this region that we’re surveying … has really never been explored in any kind of detail,” says Russell. “Anything we see is going to be new to NOAA and new to science.”
目前，为了到达这些深度，科学家们必须排队等待使用由政府机构和研究机构拥有的数量有限且昂贵的潜水器。这种模式更适合对深海进行“快照式”拍摄，而非深入探究其相互关联的生态和生物地球化学系统。“我们正在勘测的这个区域，很大一部分……从未进行过任何详细的探索，”拉塞尔说，“我们看到的任何东西对NOAA和科学界来说都将是全新的发现。”
A sediment specialist
沉积物专家
The Orpheus subs are classified as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which operate on a mix of preprogrammed commands and live decision-making and without being tethered to a ship. But unlike traditional AUVs engineered for long-distance, high-speed gliding, these submersibles are short and stout with little legs—better for making soft landings on the seafloor and then pushing into the mud to suck out sediment cores for scientists.
Orpheus潜水器被归类为自主水下航行器（AUV），它们通过预编程指令和实时决策相结合的方式运行，无需与船只连接。但与为长距离、高速滑行而设计的传统AUV不同，这些潜水器短而粗壮，带有小腿——这更有利于在海底实现软着陆，然后推入泥土中为科学家吸取沉积物岩芯。
When they do land, the submersibles can lift off the surface, thrust a few feet, and settle once more in a “hopping” fashion. Their bodies are made mostly of a buoyant material known as syntactic foam, with the important electronics encased in a thick sphere of glass. The same kind of foam, which is interspersed with hollow microspheres of glass to prevent it from collapsing under high pressures, went to the deep in the vehicle that carried the filmmaker James Cameron to the Mariana Trench in 2012; he even donated leftover material for use in earlier Orpheus prototypes.
当它们着陆后，潜水器可以离开表面，推进几英尺，然后以“跳跃”的方式再次沉降。它们的机身主要由一种称为合成泡沫的浮力材料制成，重要的电子设备则封装在一个厚玻璃球中。这种泡沫中掺杂了空心玻璃微球以防止在高压下坍塌，2012年电影制作人詹姆斯·卡梅隆（James Cameron）乘坐前往马里亚纳海沟的潜水器中使用的正是同类材料；他甚至捐赠了剩余的材料用于早期的Orpheus原型机。
At less than two meters in length and under 600 pounds (270 kilograms), Russell says the Orpheus robots are the smallest—and correspondingly the least expensive—ocean vehicles on the market capable of descending to 6,000 meters. They’re designed to populate future fleets of robotic explorers. The approach stems from a fundamental challenge, says Victoria Orphan, a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology, who has previously worked with an Orpheus vehicle on a science campaign: “Anytime you do things in the deep ocean, you always run this risk, when you put something over the side [of a ship], that it might not come back.”
拉塞尔表示，Orpheus机器人长度不到两米，重量不到600磅（270公斤），是市场上能够下潜至6000米深度的最小、也是成本最低的海洋航行器。它们旨在充实未来的机器人探测船队。加州理工学院的地质生物学家维多利亚·奥尔芬（Victoria Orphan）曾与Orpheus潜水器合作进行过科学考察，她指出，这种方法源于一个根本性的挑战：“每当你在深海进行作业时，当你把设备从船侧放入水中，你总是面临着它可能无法回来的风险。”
With existing fleets of large, expensive vessels operated by groups like NOAA, WHOI, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), losing a vehicle can be disastrous, not least because scientists must already compete for their limited time. In the spring of 2024, Orphan and her colleagues put an Orpheus sub through its paces during an expedition to study deep-sea methane seeps off the coast of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. They hoped to use the vehicle to create maps of the area before the team sent down a human-crewed submersible called Alvin to study specific areas—and the microorganisms and animals that live there—in more detail.
对于由NOAA、WHOI和蒙特利湾水族馆研究所（MBARI）等机构运营的现有大型昂贵船队来说，损失一台设备可能是灾难性的，尤其是因为科学家们本就需要为有限的使用时间进行竞争。2024年春季，奥尔芬和她的同事在阿拉斯加阿留申群岛海岸研究深海甲烷渗漏的考察中，对一台Orpheus潜水器进行了测试。他们希望在派遣载人潜水器“阿尔文号”（Alvin）深入研究特定区域及其微生物和动物之前，先利用该设备绘制该区域的地图。
But as with any sort of new type of technology, “there’s always growing pains,” recalls Orphan. Frigid temperatures and steep topography added unseen挑战, and it took the full three weeks for the sub to get high-resolution photographs of the seeps. The setback didn’t dull Orphan’s excitement about the potential of these machines. “There’s a lot of real, unknown science right at that interface between the sediment and the ocean surface,” she says. “The Orpheus-type class of instrument, with the right kinds of sensors and samplers, could be a very enabling tool.” Russell envisions…
但正如任何新技术一样，“总会有成长的烦恼，”奥尔芬回忆道。严寒的温度和陡峭的地形增加了意想不到的挑战，潜水器花了整整三周时间才拍摄到渗漏点的高分辨率照片。这次挫折并没有削弱奥尔芬对这些机器潜力的兴奋。“在沉积物和海洋表面之间的界面上，有很多真实的、未知的科学，”她说，“Orpheus这类仪器，如果配备合适的传感器和采样器，可能会成为一种非常有力的赋能工具。”拉塞尔设想……