China develops fish-shaped robot for underwater archeological research

People's Daily Online, 27/12/2004

The project of underwater bionic robotic fish co-developed by the Institute of Robot under Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) and the Automation Research Institute under Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has passed the relevant check and test on 5 Dec.

Featuring outstanding creativeness the achievement of the project has laid an important theoretic and practical basis for the engineering of underwater navigating objects.

With a black body, the 1.23-meter-long robot is much like a real fish in shape and movement. Through a palm-size remote control pad, technicians gave different instructions, making it swim supplely up and down, said Tan Min, deputy director of the Automation Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The experiment shows the underwater bionic robotic fish, which has independent intellectual property right of China, has the advantages of stability, flexible movement, automatic navigation control and underwater operation for two-three hours at a speed of 4 kilometres per hour.

"The robot is able to work for two to three hours under water with the maximum speed of 1.5 meters per second," said Wang Tianmiao, director of the Institute of Robotics at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The robot is flexible in action, easy to operate and makes little disturbance to surrounding environment. The robot had been tested in an underwater search of a sunken ancient warship last August.

Additionally, the robotic fish also sees bright future for use in the fields of underwater archaeology, photography, mapping, water cultivation and fishing as well as underwater carrying of small-sized object.

Titanic endangered by sightseers 'loving it to death': wreck's discoverer

Wed, Dec 1, 2004, Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The wreck of the doomed luxury liner Titanic is being lost to sightseers who are "loving it to death," said Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered it in 1985.

Ballard spoke Tuesday at the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society in Washington, where he is an explorer-in-residence, as part of his campaign to have the wreck protected by international treaty.

Ballard led a summer expedition to the Titanic to assess the condition of the ship after nearly two decades of visits by salvagers, scientists and tourists. He said the visits have accelerated the ship's deterioration, plundered important artifacts and left trash at the site.

"We're not opposed at all to people visiting the Titanic. We're just opposed to people loving it to death," he said.

The Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage and sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912.

Only 711 of the 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the British luxury liner survived. Many who died were well-known figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including wealthy businessmen John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim.

The sinking, still one of the worst-ever maritime disasters, captivated public attention from the start, and has been the subject of numerous books and films, including the 1997 James Cameron film "Titanic," which became the highest-grossing film in Hollywood history.

The wreck remained undisturbed 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) below the ocean's surface until Ballard and French explorer Jean Louis Michel discovered it September 1, 1985.

Ballard refused salvage rights to the wreck, saying he preferred it be preserved as a memorial to those who died. "Unfortunately, admiralty law would not permit it," he said.

A US court in 1994 granted salvage rights to Atlanta, Georgia-based RMS Titanic Inc., which has brought up some 6,000 artifacts from the wreck since 1987, some of which have been sold at auction.

The US Supreme Court in 1999 cleared the way for expeditions bringing tourists to photograph the site. The trips cost about 30,000 dollars per person.

In June, the United States signed an accord aimed at protecting the wreck from souvenir hunters and undersea tourists, joining with Britain, Canada and France in new efforts to preserve it.

Under the agreement, the Titanic would be designated as an international maritime memorial. Britain signed the accord in November 2003 and it becomes effective once two countries sign it.

Ballard said he hoped France and Russia -- which leases many of the submersibles used on sightseeing trips to the wreck -- will also soon sign the deal.

RMS Titanic has said its salvage operations are the only way to preserve valuable Titanic memorabilia from eventual disintegration. Ballard however said the wreck would be relatively stable if it was not disturbed as much as it has been.

The damage, detailed in Ballard's new book, "Return to Titanic," written with journalist Michael Sweeney, includes holes in the deck and crumpled crew cabins from collisions with submersibles. He also notes that the crow's nest where the fatal iceberg was first spotted, is now missing.

"Clearly it was knocked off," he said.

Ballard's plan calls for the wreck to be wired with robot video cameras that could beam live images to computers worldwide without risking damage to the wreck.

"The only way that vision is going to happen is if you stop destroying it," he said.

Ultimately, he said he would like to find a way to clean and paint the wreck to stem further deterioration.

"Crazy? You heard it here," he said with a laugh.

WWII Warship Cemetery Holds Italian Ship

Discovery, 30/11/2004

By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

Nov. 30, 2004 — Italian explorers have found a huge warship cemetery off the coast of Tunisia, uncovering dramatic evidence of what Italian war historians call the "Battle of the Convoys." About 277 ships sank during this battle, which took place in the Mediterranean during World War II.

"At that time, Italian troops were experiencing difficulties against the British army in the North African front. Thus Hitler decided to send there German reinforce troops," Pietro Faggioli, who led the "Mizar 4" expedition, told Discovery News.

"Lots of ships carrying supply convoys sank en route from Italy to the North Africa coast. Indeed, the British prevented the Axis moves in the Mediterranean as they managed to decipher the German Navy's communications," he said.

Among the wrecks found, Faggioli and colleagues decided to focus on the Italian cruiser Armando Diaz, which was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine HMS Upright off the island of Kerkennah during escort service in support of a Tripoli-bound Italian convoy in 1941.

As the 5,000-ton cruiser went under, 464 crew died.

"This is the first Italian cruiser that has been found in the Mediterranean. Its sinking represents one of the most tragic episodes in the Battle of the Convoys," Faggioli said.

The cruiser, 160 meters long and 15 meters wide, was used to cover, in company with cruiser Bande Nere and two destroyers, an important supply convoy from Naples to Tripoli.

But in the early hours of Feb. 25, 1941, the submarine HMS Upright sighted the ships and fired four torpedoes. A torpedo hit the Armando Diaz between the first and the second tower, right where the ammunition was stored. The ship sank in six minutes after a huge explosion.

"We found the wreck, lying on the left side, the cannons headed toward (its) enemy. It was an impressive sight. A large part of the ship, about 30 meters, was completely pulverized by the explosion. The men of the crew who were in that area were dissolved. Nothing remains of them," Faggioli said.

Other sailors were trapped in different areas of the ship, their remains still lying on the sea floor. Only 147 sailors, who were in safer areas, survived. Faggioli's team left a plate by the wreck: "Italians did not forget you," it says.

There is no doubt that the cruiser is the Armando Diaz, since the divers took pictures showing the ship's name.

The discovery is also consistent with accounts from the historic archives of the Italian Navy.

"There was a first explosion, then a bigger, second one similar to a fire fountain. You could see pieces of the ship flying in the air. Then everything disappeared," said an official from the other Italian escort cruiser Bande Nere.

Faggioli and colleagues plan to uncover other ships on a second expedition next summer.

Monster of the Deep: a sunken seaplane discovered

The Star Bulletin, 14/12/2004

By Burl Burlingame

The deep-diving scientists of the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab discovered a midget off Pearl Harbor a couple of years ago, and now they've uncovered a giant.

In August, while cataloging the debris field around the wreck of a Japanese midget submarine, HURL submarine pilot Terry Kerby ran across the inverted keel of a "flying boat."

"It was enormous, but it was lying flat on the hard bottom just sticking up a few feet and there was no way it could have been buried that deeply," said Kerby. "Nearby, we found the nose of the aircraft with the word 'Marshall' written on it. We had no idea what it was."

Late last week, on a return survey sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration, the team confirmed the discovery. The wreck is that of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft ever built, and part of a trans-Pacific U.S. Navy transport service after World War II.

Marshall Mars once carried more than 308 people aloft, a record at the time and headlined by one newspaper as "Mars Is Well-Inhabited."

In the spring of 1950, during a test flight off of Diamond Head, one of Marshall Mars' engines caught fire, and the pilot landed in the open ocean. Although the crew got out safely and a fireboat was soon on the scene, the plane burned, exploded and sank. The cause was thought to be a leaking fuel line, although it could not be confirmed because the wreckage vanished, swallowed by the ocean.

"The flattened keel makes sense now that we know she burned almost to the waterline," said Kerby. "We began to suspect she was the Marshall Mars when HURL researcher Steve Price found a great photo of the plane with a hundred sailors standing on the wing. Right on the nose you can see the plane's name."

On the return dive, Kerby maneuvered near bent and corroded aluminum aircraft debris, still streaked with traces of dark blue paint. "Then we came upon a huge engine, nose in to the bottom," said Kerby. "Further on, we saw propellers sticking up, some straight, some twisted, and as we turned the sub, we saw the propellers were attached to a second huge engine that was still on the wing. And then we discovered a third engine. We knew we'd found the main body of Marshall Mars."

"Submerged historic wreck sites are like time capsules from our maritime past," said NMSP maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg. "In this case, naval aircraft sites shed light on our technological capabilities both before and during World War II. Seaplanes and flying boats played a critical role in Hawaii and the Pacific."

The gigantic flying boats made an impression on anyone who flew in them. Aviation radioman George Hutton flew in four of the five Mars seaplanes, including Marshall Mars.

"She was a fine flying boat," he recalled to NOAA officials, "but takeoff and landing could be a little hairy, depending on the seas."

During one port visit, he walked out on the Mars' 200-foot wing. "It was like a football field," he said.


Craft took names of island chains

In the days following the Pearl Harbor attack, with German and Japanese submarines threatening shipping off American coasts, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser suggested that his shipyards construct hundreds of gigantic flying boats to supply forces overseas.

Kaiser eventually teamed up with Howard Hughes and built the Spruce Goose to prove the concept.

Another team, led by Glenn Martin's aircraft company, followed a parallel track. Enormous seaplanes were an obsession with the designer -- Martin built Pan Am's China Clipper in the mid-1930s -- and his engineers modified their Sky Battleship XPB2M-1 into a pure transport.

The prototype aircraft was named the Martin Mars and pressed into active duty in late 1943. One of her first flights was a 4,700-mile round-trip to Hawaii, carrying a load of 20,500 pounds in 27 hours, 26 minutes.

The giant aircraft flew continuously for the duration, leading Martin to announce that the "Mars is the most efficient airplane in the world, per pound of weight, per horsepower and per gallon of fuel consumed. She has also proven herself one of the safest."

The Navy was impressed and ordered 20, now coded the JRM-1. War's end curtailed production at six airframes, named after Pacific island chains. One of them was the Hawaii Mars, which crashed in a landing during flight tests.

The Mars was the largest-capacity production aircraft prior to the introduction of the Boeing 747, and distinguished itself during the Korean War as a trans-Pacific transport, carrying 134 seated troops or 84 stretcher patients and 25 medics per flight.

The Navy retired the Mars in 1956, and all four remaining airframes were purchased by British Columbia-based Forest Industries as flying tankers. Marianas Mars crashed in an accident in 1961, and Caroline Mars was destroyed in a typhoon a year later.

Nearly 60 years after they were built, both the Philippine and Hawaii Mars 2 are still working, dropping 7,000-gallon loads of water on West Coast forest fires.

Martin JRM-1 Mars
Wingspan: 200 feet
Length: 117 feet 3 inches
Height: 38 feet 5 inches
Empty weight: 75,573 pounds
Maximum speed: 221 mph
Range: 4,945 miles
Armament: none
Crew: 11

New law helps protects military shipwrecks

The State, Nov. 29, 2004

CHARLESTON, S.C. - The waters along the South Carolina coast are littered with the wrecks of warships and now a new federal law will help better protect them.

Under the law, federal agents can seize a treasure hunter's boat and fine him $100,000 a day for trying to loot such wrecks, which by law belong to the federal government. The law could allow criminal charges to be brought as well.

A recent survey by the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology identified 46 wrecks in South Carolina waters, some accessible to small boats.

In Charleston Harbor, the location of the Confederate ships Chicora and Palmetto State as well as the Union ironclad Patapsco are commonly known.

The law applies to military wrecks, but not to commercial vessels.

It was needed because new technology has made it easier to locate wrecks, said Bob Neyland, the head of underwater archaeology at the Naval Historical Center and the coordinator for the Hunley project.

"This will go a long way to protecting war graves; and it will go a long way toward protecting archaeological sites," he said.

The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was raised off the coast in 2000 and is now in a conservation lab in North Charleston.

The act covers thousands of wrecks in waters worldwide and dozens of Civil War-era ships alone the South Carolina coast.

State Archaeologist Jonathan Leader said the law targets those who would loot wrecks.

"Obviously they are not just going after people who stumble upon these wrecks," Leader said. "The real issue is people out for gain or profit off these wrecks. I have no sympathy for those people and am glad this is being done."

James Hunter, a Naval Historical Center archaeologist working at the Hunley lab, said the law protects vessels in many places.

A few years ago, a Maine man found the remains of a Revolutionary-era naval vessel in the Penobscot River near Bangor. He told officials about the wreck and archaeologists from the center have conducted three surveys.

But almost anyone can reach the vessel.

"It's so close to shore you could hit it with a rock," Hunter said. "This will serve as protective legislation for these wrecks."

Neyland said the government wants to first protect the sanctity of war graves and then learn more about the vessels.

"This is meant to protect these wrecks for the greatest public benefit," he said.