A robotic submarine yesterday mapped the bottom of the world's deepest water-filled sinkhole in Mexico for the first time. Similar autonomous craft could some day be used to explore the oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa, researchers hope.DEPTHX (Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer) is 2 metres wide, weighs 1.3 tonnes and is equipped with movement, depth, temperature, and salinity sensors in separate pressurised chambers. Sonar beams all around the probe to provide a map of its surroundings for navigation. A sampling arm can extend to collect samples from the walls of the sinkhole.
Entering El Zacatón Cenote in eastern Mexico for the first time on Wednesday, DEPTHX dived down to 270 meters, creating the first map of the giant cavity, which is large enough to swallow New York's Chrysler Building.
The maps show that the sinkhole has a sloped bottom, about 290 meters at shallowest and extending down to over 300 meters.
Beyond human reach
This means that two drivers who made a record-breaking scuba dive in 1994 in search of the bottom were just a few metres off the sloping floor.
Sheck Exley and Jim Bowden went in search of the bottom of El Zacatón Cenote in 1994. Bowden set a new scuba depth record of 281.94 meters, but Exley died at a depth just a few meters shallower.
The sinkhole may be connected to even deeper caverns. At the bottom of the slope, was an area DEPTHX's could not probe. This could be simply a depression or the entrance to further caves. The researchers hope to send the probe back later this week to find out, and to explore any connected passages.
The robotic probe is operated by a team of geologists from the University of Texas, and was designed and built by roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University, and a company called StoneAerospace, in the US. The project is partly funded by NASA, and it is hoped that similar technology could one day probe the oceans of other planets and moons (see Other worlds, other lives...).
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Read the Full article: Newscientisttech.com
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