UNDERSEA VEHICLES AND NATIONAL NEEDS by Committee on Undersea Vehicles & National Needs

Author:Committee on Undersea Vehicles & National Needs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Earth Sciences : Ocean Studies. Engineering and Technology : Applications of Technology
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 1996-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

3

Vital National Needs

Undersea vehicles have evolved into important tools for investigating the deep ocean and managing its resources. In their versatility and their power, these vehicles can be compared, perhaps, with satellites, although they operate in a vastly different realm. Like satellites, they expand the scope of human observation. A large fraction of the boundaries of the Earth’s crustal plates are in the deep ocean and directly observable only by using undersea vehicles. Undersea vehicles give us access to vital information on our environment. Like satellites, they offer new perspectives and enable new tasks. They may even be the basis of entire new industries, such as subsea mining. The results of the first undersea explorations have fired scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs with the universal desire to know more, to explore further, to extend the human reach. This chapter reviews some of the potential of those explorations for furthering the national interests in a range of scientific, regulatory, military, and industrial fields.

To illustrate these potential contributions, the committee has included the four focal projects shown in Table 3-1—technology development and integration projects that could lead to new applications of undersea vehicles in support of national objectives:

• synoptic observation system

• blue water oceanographic sections and hydrographic surveys

• subsea oil field inspection and intervention

• search and survey

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.