A Dock Away From Home

Former WHOI engineer Greg Packard inspects a docking station designed and built by Hydroid, Inc. for the autonomous underwater vehicle REMUS. Two of these stations will be deployed to the Pioneer Array off of southern New England, part of the global Ocean Observatories Initiative. Attached to the array’s electro-mechanical surface moorings, the docking stations allow the AUVs to download data and recharge their batteries between surveying and sampling missions. Power is supplied by solar panels, a wind turbine, and a fuel cell on the buoy that extends the duration of AUV deployments and allows for multiple missions between deployment and recovery. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)