Unmanned submarines glide across the ocean, putting Rutgers at leading edge of exploration

by Judy Peet/The Star-Ledger

As millions of people watched Hurricane Bill batter the Dominican Republic via satellite last week, Drake sought a different view: from 3,000 feet beneath the pounding seas.

Going where no man could, Drake, a 7-foot yellow robotic submarine from Rutgers University, proved there is yet another application for a fleet that university oceanographers hope will one day populate the globe. Already, Drake's sister ship, Scarlet, is two-thirds of the way toward completing the world's first trans-Atlantic crossing.

Another Slocum glider, as oceanographers prefer to call the robo-subs, was launched off Sandy Hook Thursday on a ground-breaking mission to patrol the shallow waters of the entire New Jersey coast, taking ocean bed samples every two seconds. Another will head to Antarctica this fall to monitor polar storms too brutal for human survival.

The military is interested, as are Homeland Security, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection, NATO, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"In just a few years, we are changing the way people look at the entire ocean," said Scott Glenn, 53, designer and project director of the Rutgers Coastal Ocean Observation Lab, better known as RU COOL. "Ten years ago people said we were talking crazy. Now they want a piece of the action."

Gliders are relatively inexpensive -- about $100,000 each -- sturdy and remarkably efficient; Scarlet, the trans-Atlantic sub, is expected to run 3,600 miles on the energy it takes to run three Christmas tree lights.

Rutgers does not have a monopoly on gliders, nor does it make them. Many oceanographic institutes around the country use gliders. The COOL team is building a reputation, however, for adaptations they made to the Slocum glider, increasing both the range and capabilities of the sub.

Rutgers' genius is "showing the utility of the gliders in new and broad-ranging applications," said Russ Davis, a noted researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego.

The applications include monitoring water temperature and currents, cross-referenced with surface and air measurements. Gliders also offer search and rescue teams more accurate sea targets.

Zdenka Willis, a program director at NOAA, said the Scarlet voyage will "open up new frontiers in the ocean." She said Rutgers gliders are critical support for Coast Guard operations, adding: "This is about saving lives."

Gliders can measure contaminants, locate mines, record deep sea phenomena, plot underwater assaults, detect terrorists, track storms and count fisheries. Perhaps their greatest potential is in predicting climate change.

They also Twitter.

"The New Jersey near-coastal observing project Rutgers launched last week is huge," said Davis. "Intensive sampling of the sea bed, integrated with a comprehensive surface and air observing system? It's priceless."

Priceless now, but costly in the making. Over the past 16 years, Glenn said he raised $80 million in foundation and governmental grants to underwrite the lab. In doing so, he and COOL co-founder Oscar Schofield assembled an inter-disciplinary team that includes physicists, biologists, engineers, computer geeks, ecologists, even film students.

As Davis noted, "Oceanography is not a field of discipline. It is a place that demands all disciplines. Rutgers has been good at integrating different factions."

The ocean observation lab is located 35 miles from the nearest salt water at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science on Cook Campus in New Brunswick.

It is surprisingly busy, with several gliders in pieces in "sick bay," and students wandering in and out of the COOL lab with its multiple monitors constantly updating in real time. There is a tank down the hall for submersion testing and rooms filled with oceanographic esoterica ranging from ultra high-tech sensors to hemp rope.

Writing fellow Dena Seidel comes in with a documentary her students filmed of the Scarlet crossing. They are shopping it to markets including the Science Channel and National Geographic.

Engineer Dave Aragon tinkers with a disemboweled sub. It's Wednesday, the day Drake was asked to stalk Hurricane Bill, a day before the New Jersey coastal launch and two days before a COOL team headed to the Azores to find Scarlet, who appears to be ailing in the last leg of her ocean crossing.

"She's receiving messages, but she seems not to be making headway," said Josh Kohut, 34, a physical oceanography professor and member of the COOL team. "We're afraid she may be bogged down by barnacle growth or maybe a remora."

Remora are fish noted for their ability to hitch rides on fish such as sharks. At up to 3 feet in length, their weight could change Scarlet's ballast. The Azores team will leave her in the water, but try to scrape off any critters. It might even be just a plastic bag plugging her intake.

The robo subs face many threats. One was eaten by a shark, another run over by a boat. Weighing barely 150 pounds, gliders are in danger from ships, dredgers and line fishermen, sharks, giant squid and interlopers.

Researchers love the story of the glider that disappeared during a mission off Australia. Signals from her tail told the team she was out of the water. They used GPS to track the sub to a front lawn outside of Sidney.

They sent people to recover the sub, which had been pilfered by a recreational fisherman. The search party ran into local police who had been called by a neighbor who thought the bullet-shaped glider might be a bomb.

The glider was returned to the sea unharmed.

Kohut has a long relationship with gliders. As an undergraduate in 1999, he was on board when Glenn tested the first glider prototype in New Jersey waters. Also along was retired Woods Hole Institute engineer Douglas Webb, who invented the Slocum glider, which is still manufactured by Webb's company in Cape Cod, Mass.

Webb and Glenn were afraid the glider would sink and be lost. Glenn attached a rope to the sub and tied it around Kohut with instructions to sacrifice himself if he had to, to save the glider.

Since then, Rutgers gliders have logged 40,000 undersea miles on 166 missions, collecting 383,367 profiles.

The earliest Rutgers gliders were named Poseiden and Cruiser, but the team was traumatized when they were lost at sea. Now they are called RU 1 through 57. It is hard, one student said, "not to get attached. They are so plucky."

Scarlet got a name because of her trans-Atlantic potential fame. She was named by Rutgers President Richard McCormick after the RU football team, the Scarlet Knights. Drake is actually short for the Drake glider, a new type of robo sub the COOL team is testing.

The beauty of the Slocum glider is its simplicity. It has wings but no propeller, sort of a cross between a torpedo and a hang glider. Its locomotion is based on a porpoise, yo-yoing up and down as water is forced through the nose cone and pushed out by a buoyancy pump.

It communicates via satellite. The sending equipment is in a raised tail, which leaves the center section of the glider free for research payload. The smaller 6-foot gliders, like the one off the Jersey coast, operate off two alkaline batteries and can run continuously for up to 30 days.

Scarlet uses a lithium battery and can run up to 300 days. A drawback is that researchers can only communicate with the glider when its tail is above the surface, when it is most vulnerable to shipping traffic. The gliders are also quite slow, traveling 1 knot per hour.

Smaller models surface once an hour and transmit all data. The larger ones, Scarlet and Drake, surface once every eight hours.

It's Friday and there is an update on Drake's blog. She didn't intercept with Hurricane Bill, but did, according to the entry "enter an undiscovered ocean full of nasty biology." Plus, there's a chance the hurricane will again shift and veer back into Drake's path.

No word yet from the Azores team, but Glenn is positive Scarlet will reach the European mainland.

"Did we need to do a trans-Atlantic crossing? Probably not, but we've learned so much and this is the kind of stuff that fires the imagination," Glenn said. "My goal is global. I want thousands of these little buggers in every direction."

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