In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

She took a sip from her wine, and seemed to contemplate it. I watched her run her tongue across her lips, feeling the burn on my face again. ‘Look, it’s fraught with paradoxes. First, you need to decide whether the vehicle should be remote operated or autonomous. Obviously the first’s easier, quicker to build, and if there’s a visual feed it’s an advantage if you can move it around. But there’s a limit to what you can do with ROVs, and where you can put them. At extreme depths, they basically shut down – comms fail, and because they’re not autonomous, the thing just sits there. Comms are one of the first things to go – another soft part, if you like. So ROVs are great for shallower areas, but not so great on a trip like this. And useless in Europa’s 100-mile seafloors.’ ‘So you built something autonomous?’ ‘We tried. There are various stages between ROV and automated. The quickest useful thing to build – useful for getting started – is a vehicle with a route programmed into it. So, for example, you direct it to explore the seabed in a zig-zag motion for 150 metres.’ ‘So it isn’t actually autonomous.’ ‘It’s controlled externally, remotely, it’s just that the instructions are coded in a bit earlier, so it doesn’t have to rely on a volatile feed.’