Touring an oceanic research vessel

Back on the 11th I had the opportunity to take a tour of the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer, the only federal ship dedicated to mapping and exploring the deep sea and sea floor while it was in port in Hilo. (This was through Gemini; some of the ship's crew got a return tour of the telescope a few days later.) The ship itself is a converted former Navy submarine hunter, making it perfect for running quietly while carrying out sonar mapping.

View from in front of the bow.

The Okeanos Explorer can carry and deploy underwater vehicles equipped with lights, video feeds, arms for grabbing samples, and more, and livestream their underwater expeditions. I've come across clips from them on YouTube before, so it was really neat getting to see where those discoveries came from.

Starboard side of roughly the latter half of the ship.

You might have heard about the Okeanos Explorer from when their discovery of a mysterious golden-colored egg on the ocean floor briefly went viral earlier this year. It was about the size of an emu egg and had a hole where something had hatched, but no one was able to identify what species it might have come from, which gave it an evocative, mysterious appeal that made it briefly famous. So far it still hasn't been identified; I asked our guide about it, and found out she'd been the one who bagged it up when it was collected for study, so “all the world was going crazy about this thing, and I had it in a Zip-loc bag full of ethanol,” as she put it.

The control room for the underwater vehicles, and livestreaming the expeditions.

We got a lot of interesting information over the course of an hour and a half; the ship had been in the Pacific several years ago, but had then been in the Atlantic the past few years, and is now back in the Pacific for a few years on its first expedition of several (though it doesn't have underwater vehicles for this one, it's a mapping expedition instead). It left harbor sometime over the weekend on a ten-day voyage to where it will have begun its mapping by now in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to the north-west. It was supposed to leave at 0830 Saturday morning, and I was hoping to catch it with my drone when it did from the lookout point on the west side of the bay, but something must've come up since it still hadn't left the dock after an hour and a half. I found out I could zoom in with my phone and make it out at dock (from several kilometers away!), which resulted in some shots like the one below artistically framed by a vine in the foreground.

The Okeanos Explorer at dock (the white ball near center is its radar dome).

Overall it was a really interesting tour and I'm glad I got to go. One thing that struck me was how a number of aspects of running a science ship like that mirrored running an observatory; one major parallel was how the weather dictates the schedule for both, but there were a number of other little similarities as well. It was fascinating to hear about the work they do, especially with having previously seen video clips taken from the ship. I guess that's another parallel to astronomy: trying to engage the public and share the knowledge they're gaining. Which I thought was pretty inspiring. A hui hou!