So close!

If you look at the vehicle tracks in my previous post, you'll see that one vessel (Piccard Maru) has a track that's heading north, somewhat erratically. The rudder module lost power, so now we can't steer it, and it's drifting. We haven't finally decided yet, but it's close enough that we could go out to pick it up and see what really happened. Right now the seas are too high and stormy to safely head out. The suspicion is that the problem was caused by a manufacturing defect in the umbilical cable that connects the two parts of the craft, which caused the power line to fray.
March 6, 2012