SATURDAY, 04.11.09

0540: Days 3 & 4 (Thursday & Friday)
Hello all, operations continue along at a pretty good pace. Rather than detail the specifics of the vehicle launch and recovery times, which starts to feel like something of a bus schedule, I’ll just say so far things are moving along nicely. We are just a few minutes away from putting Mary Ann down for her fourth mission since we got on station and Ginger went in earlier this evening for her fourth. We’re working up into boxes 19a/b.

Yesterday we ended up with both vehicles on the surface for a time — something I don’t really care for, but cannot always prevent. This happened due to a long period of trying to get the vehicle inertial navigation unit to align with the satellites in the region. We think this is partly caused by the very large A-frame that sits just above the vehicles when they are resting in the LARS. This crane is used to launch the submersible that the Seward Johnson normally carries and is quite large, covering a huge portion of the sky above the LARS. A normal GPS can hook up quite quickly in the same spot as the vehicle antenna, but the inertial navigation unit is a militarily sensitive and proprietary technology and we are unable to change the operating parameters in any fashion. Thus, we are subject to its peculiarities with little recourse. When the nav unit has a difficult time aligning, we often end up sitting with the equipment in the LARS for up to 45 minutes. This sometimes has the ship running past the launch point, she then turns and sometimes this slows the alignment process further. We are trying to come up with solutions,  but so far it seems to be something we can do little about.

Anyway, as I was saying, the other day we had a hard time getting aligned for a launch. This pushed us into the envelope of the other vehicle’s mission completion time and we had to make the call to roll the vehicle back into the van in order to recover the vehicle coming to the surface. We just made it; we no more than got to the recovery site than Mary Ann came to the surface. We were again in one of those instances where we had them both aboard. We could delay launching one or the other to give us a window between them so this does not continue to happen, but my gut tells me as soon as we did that we would get an abort or some other condition that would have them both back up on the surface at the same time again. That could happen tomorrow — one aborts or has to be re-called and the launch windows will separate significantly. So, for now we’re just gonna work the gear, get ‘em up and get them back down as quickly and efficiently as we can. I’m not changing anything while things are moving along in the current fashion.

And how is that? These numbers do not take into account the latest two missions from today, but they do speak for themselves. At the end of Leg 1, we were at 53 percent and had covered 927 square miles with 25.1 square miles a day. As of close of business on April 9 (day 3, mind you), the overall stats are as follows: we are at 56 percent efficiency with 1,025  nautical square miles covered successfully for an average rate of 26.3 miles per day.

Those are baby steps I can totally live with. That’s it for me, time for the rack.