Gizmo goes deep in lake

By DEVIN WEEKS

Hagadone News Network

COEUR d’ALENE — A small crew of "gizmologists" braved the after-Christmas cold on Tuesday to dunk a remotely operated vehicle into the icy waters of Lake Coeur d'Alene.

The mission: To prepare the ROV for the depths of Lake Pend Oreille.

"Coeur d’Alene’s not deep, but Pend Oreille is, and that’s our real playground," said project lead Chris Beaty. "Here’s the fun part. We were told that Pend Oreille is dark, lifeless and if you land on the bottom you can’t see anything for days because the silt’s been stirred up and there’s no water flow, so there's nothing to see or do."

But for the sake of science and Gizmo-CDA's Gizmo2Xtremes program, Beaty and his team sent the ROV into Pend Oreille anyway.

What they found only heightened the intrigue.

"When we landed, it was super clear, sandy and it was full of shrimp," he said. "We were nearly attacked by them. They were all over us like we were dinner.

"There was a lot of surprise that there were shrimp at 940 feet," he said. "Are they there because the kokanee were dying at that point? Are they down there are all the time? What other life forms are down there? What’s adapted to those depths and to those light levels?”

This first dive, which occurred in the spring, only took the ROV that far into the 1,150-foot-deep lake because of the limitations of the 1,000-foot Ethernet cable. The team now has a 2,000-foot fiber optic cable that will allow the ROV more freedom as it gathers samples and records audio and video.

"Now we can kind of fly across the bottom," Beaty said. "We don’t know much — is it all sandy and silty, are there rock formations, are there trenches, is it just all smooth or are there big boulders down there?"

During the preflight check Tuesday, Beaty and team tested the roughly 40-pound ROV's new thrusters and code along with its tether deployment system. They used a hoist system to get it safely over a southern edge of The Coeur d'Alene Resort Floating Boardwalk and monitored it on a laptop.

"The equipment has to withstand pressure," said Barb Mueller, who founded Gizmo-CDA with husband Marty in 2014. "The motors are exposed but all the housing has to be water tight so it doesn’t corrode."

Pressure is a big piece of the equation. Beaty said Pend Oreille is more than 400 pounds per square inch at the bottom, pressure that will implode a pingpong ball at 170 feet.

"That’s a lot," he said. “In fact, our first vehicle, part of it imploded and the other part caught on fire."

The applications of this ROV's deep-water journey are many, from the collaboration of design and construction to the future projects it will inspire.

"It’s a place for us to develop it, but then it becomes a vehicle for school kids or whomever to study various things: biology, physics, geology," Beaty said.

It’s also an opportunity to study history.

"There are sunken items on the bottom of the lake that should be really neat to explore and check out,” he said.

Gizmo2Xtremes is a joint project to conduct experiments with robots that will travel high into near space with balloons and dive deep into Lake Pend Oreille.

Barb said it’s been interesting watching the troubleshooting process and the interaction between mentors, robotics students and younger kids as they work on the experiments. Xtremes has attracted professionals to volunteer their time and skills somewhere other than at work — one man on the crew spent most of his career working on Navy submarines, and another volunteer with a software background is presently developing a new company.

"It’s been exactly what you would like to have happen, where there is mentoring going on but it's more of an open dialogue than just mentoring,” she said.

The ROV successfully passed its testing Tuesday and will be exploring Pend Oreille in the near future once a boat has been secured for the journey.

Info: www.gizmo-cda.org