Poliris rises

My dear friends, do not be deceived. Appearances are not as always as they seem. You see, you have been misinformed: this whole time that I've been helping Andrew with the lander, I was actually working on a rocket ship.

The lander is nicknamed "Poliris," which is a play on words. It's said that she rises out of the water like the Polaris missile, and since Andrew's institute is IRIS, Polaris became Poliris. I first heard this nickname early in the cruise, and I've been anxiously waiting to see the lander rise out of the water ever since. We sent the acoustic signal to call her up from the seafloor yesterday morning, and from the very beginning, we were astounded. She rose like a spacecraft bound for the moon, launching herself into orbit with titan force.

Rise rates for the landers on board - not that anyone is
keeping score.

When you send an acoustic release signal, you listen first for a response from the lander to confirm that it was released. Then to make doubly sure it's rising from the seafloor, you send out a simple call-and-answer ranging signal. It's like playing Marco Polo with your equipment, except the lander responds with its depth. If you send the ranging signals a minute apart, you can get a good estimate of how fast the lander is rising. Our first range reading was 4162 m, but just a minute later, the lander had risen to 4079 m. That's 83 meters per minute. Freaky fast.

Lander recovery. Photo by Astrid Leitner.

Whenever landers come to the surface, we all go out to the bow and watch for it. Poliris popped out of the water with no problems, and even though I was hoping for more of a show, it was nice to see she had made it. Ok, here's where lander recovery gets complicated: we have to pull the ship up alongside it and pick it up out of the water somehow. We have to get very close to the lander - close enough that we can hook it with a long pole - but leave enough space so that the lander doesn't bang into the side of the ship. Thankfully, the ship's crew has a lot of experience with lander recoveries, and they work like a well-oiled machine. Once we have a line on the lander and it's under our control, we can use the crane to hoist it out of the water and place it on deck. The whole recovery operation went quite smoothly, and we got the lander back in good order. One recovery down!

Andrew signaling the lander recovery was A-Ok. Photo by Astrid Leitner.