28 days at sea alone with nothing to look at but the waves and ocean floor
A human-free autonomous boat known as the Saildrone Surveyor has successfully sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii to cross the Pacific Ocean while mapping the topography of the seabed, an achievement made less than a month after a similar IBM-powered boat failed. The Saildrone Surveyor,22 metres long and weighing 12,700 kilograms, sailed 2,250 nautical miles over 28 days to map 6,400 nautical miles of seafloor. The project is the largest attempt yet to map Earth’s undersea landscape; we have mapped the Moon more than our planet’s deep oceans. The boat uses a 360 o camera to record its surroundings.
