Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, operators of Nereus, has confirmed that the hybrid autonomous underwater vehicle (HROV) was lost on Saturday, May 10, 2014, as it was exploring at a depth of approximately 10 kilometers. Debris later found at the surface suggests that the robotic deep-sea explorer imploded due to the intense pressures.

The robotic vehicle Nereus went missing while exploring one of the ocean’s deepest spots: the Kermadec Trench, which lies north east of New Zealand.

Nereus was a flagship ocean explorer for the US science community.

“Nereus helped us explore places we’ve never seen before and ask questions we never thought to ask,” said the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Timothy Shank.

“It was a one-of-a-kind vehicle that even during its brief life brought us amazing insights into the unexplored deep ocean, addressing some of the most fundamental scientific problems of our time about life on Earth.”

The $8m (£4.7m) robot was built in 2008 and could operate in an autonomous mode or remotely controlled via a tether to a support ship to explore the Earth’s deepest oceanic trenches.

It used a lot of innovative technologies that allowed it to do things and go places that were off-limits to other research submersibles.

These technologies included rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in laptop computers, for extended power, and single-hair’s-width fibre-optic cables – borrowed from torpedoes – for control and telemetry.

Leading British oceanographer Jonathan Copley, from the University of Southampton, said the loss of an underwater vehicle was an ever-present risk.

“To obtain some kinds of knowledge – particularly when physical samples are required for analysis – there is no alternative to sending equipment into the deep ocean, because the ocean’s watery veil masks its depths from many forms of remote sensing”, he wrote on a University of Southampton blog this weekend.

“And although we have learned a lot from a century or so of largely ‘blind sampling’ by equipment such as trawls and seabed corers (which are still fine for answering some questions in some areas), we now often require more detailed sampling and surveying, using deep-sea vehicles, to answer further questions.”

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news