![]() The only moment of excitement happened at 31,000 feet, when the crew heard a loud bang. He and Piccard, who died in 2008, monitored a handful of instruments, looked for leaks and watched passing bioluminescent creatures from the sphere’s single porthole. Walsh recalls the downward trip as being relatively boring. It took nearly five hours to reach the sea bottom - nearly seven miles down. in rough seas, but once beneath the waves, the craft plunged smoothly and steadily at a rate of about 180 feet per minute. Their goal was simple: Prove that humans could safely explore the ocean’s depths. Jacques Piccard, the son of Auguste, served as a consultant. The project was headed by Scripps graduate and deep-sea pioneer Andreas Rechnitzer of the Naval Electronics Laboratory on Point Loma. “The subs I had worked operated at maximum depths of 300, 400 feet,” he said. It got him out of shore duty, though later he said no one had told him about the Challenger Deep plans. In 1959, Walsh, a 27-year-old submarine lieutenant, volunteered to become the Trieste’s first officer in charge. It had the bathyscaph shipped to San Diego for testing and modifications over the next year and a half. ![]() The Navy was looking for a vehicle capable of deep-sea ventures. Office of Naval Research in 1958 for $250,000. To ascend, internal hoppers released tons of iron pellets.Ī cash-strapped Piccard sold the Trieste to the U.S. To descend, the crew flooded air-filled ballast tanks. Two people occupied a 6½-foot steel sphere that was attached underneath a 50-foot-long steel float filled, in part, with 28,000 gallons of buoyant aviation fuel. ![]() The vessel was named after the Italian city where much of it was built.īy today’s standards, the Trieste’s technologies were relatively crude. Piccard used the proceeds to construct and launch the Trieste in 1953. His first bathyscaph - a word Piccard coined from the Greek “baths,” meaning deep, and “scaphe,” meaning ship - was built and sold to the French navy. He then shifted his attention downward, realizing that his gondola might also take humans into the depths of the sea. The Trieste was the creation of Auguste Piccard, a Swiss physicist who invented a pressurized aluminum gondola that set a balloon altitude record of 51,775 feet in 1931. Only two unmanned attempts have successfully replicated the feat: a Japanese robotic probe called Kaiko in 1995 and a remotely operated American vehicle named Nereus last year. Walsh and Piccard remain the only humans to have delved so deeply into the Mariana Trench, an undersea subduction zone where tectonic plates collide and plunge back into Earth’s molten mantle. There is one notable difference: A dozen astronauts, all from the Apollo program, walked on the moon. He helped develop the first detailed maps of the global seafloor in the 1990s. “It was like putting a man on the moon,” said David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, part of the University of California San Diego. 23, Walsh and other participants in the historic dive of the Trieste bathyscaph will gather at the Town and Country Resort in Mission Valley to commemorate their achievement. San Diego should be as proud of this as of building (Charles) Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. “Step by step, they pushed back the frontier and helped open up a new world. “These guys were pioneers in the truest sense,” said Kevin Hardy, vice president at Deep sea Power & Light, a submersible-technology company in Kearny Mesa. This spot, 35,797 feet below the surface, is the deepest surveyed point of Earth’s oceans. 23, 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard became the first people to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. There was no air, and the atmospheric pressures were crushing - up to 8 tons per square inch, strong enough to bend steel. Online: For photos of the Trieste and other deep-sea vehicles, go to /trieste50įifty years ago, two men in an odd-looking vessel out of San Diego ventured to a place no human had gone before - a site as remote and dangerous as a lunar landscape.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |