Group Effort Recovers Valuable NOAA Prototype

Teri Frady, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries Service
Lt. Cmdr. Matt Wingate, Office of Coast Survey, NOAA Ocean Service

September 18, 2009 — It didn’t take a village, but it did take a family — the NOAA family and a few others — to recover a unique and valuable scientific instrument, known as the Mariner Shuttle, from the bottom of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay on Aug., 12.

The Mariner Shuttle is a prototype for studying large marine ecosystems and is the only fully operational unit in existence. As it is towed through the water, instruments on this compact device measure ocean productivity, from water chemistry to zooplankton (tiny, free-floating organisms in aquatic systems) and light penetration.

While NOAA’s Fisheries Service scientists were conducting a routine sampling cruise on July 16, the Mariner Shuttle hit a snag, probably a steel cable or line. The towline snapped and the shuttle sank to the bottom in about 90 feet of water. 

“I was concerned about losing the shuttle since it has become such a mainstay of our Narragansett Bay ecosystem monitoring project," said Chris Melrose, the NOAA chief scientist on the shuttle cruises.

Searching for the Proverbial Needle in the Haystack

After the loss of this important prototype, Mark Berman, Marine Shuttle creator and oceanographer with NOAA’s Fisheries Service, immediately contacted other local research institutions to help locate the equipment.

The University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography and Naval Undersea Warfare Center both readily responded to Berman’s request with side-scan sonar surveys in the area, which produced several possible targets — but no Mariner Shuttle.

Recalling that NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey also had been surveying in Narragansett Bay with a newly installed multi-beam sonar system on the hull of their 30-foot launch, Berman contacted them for assistance.

“Even though we did not yet have the equipment precisely calibrated, we could still locate targets, understanding that they might be off true position by several meters,” explains Lt. Matthew Jaskoski, the officer in charge of the response team that installed the sonar system. “To correct for that, we estimated our measurements as we looked for promising targets.”

One NOAA, One Successful Effort

The crew found two targets and marked the locations with surface floats. The next day, using multi-beam sonar, they marked the targets more precisely.

Following the crew’s designations, a dive team and support crew from NOAA Fisheries Service and University of Rhode Island found the shuttle only about five yards from one of the marks.

“Cooperation between different elements of NOAA resulted in successful recovery of the shuttle. It is a great example of the ‘one NOAA’ concept at work,” said Kenneth Sherman, director of NOAA Fisheries Service's Narragansett Laboratory.

This event also demonstrates the value of co-locating several world-class oceanographic assets on Narragansett Bay.

Without the cooperation of Navy and NOAA side-scan sonar survey teams and the support from the University of Rhode Island dive team, the shuttle might well have been forever lost, jeopardizing an important time series of data used for Narragansett Bay ecosystem management.