OceanWorks to manufacture instruments for underwater observatory project

Offshore Staff

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Neptune Canada has contracted OceanWorks to design and manufacture underwater instrument junction boxes for the Neptune cabled observatory project.

The Neptune Canada cable network will feature five to six nodes to which seafloor laboratories can be configured using OceanWorks supplied junction boxes. Each junction box can support up to 10 individual instrument interfaces using a variety of ethernet or serial communication links.

Each junction box supplies up to 1.5 kW of power to each instrument in a variety of voltages to allow for maximum configurability. The junction box is the primary science interface and can be configured pre-deployment and is immediately available once connected to the node. Data is passed from the junction box to the node, allowing information and images gathered by Neptune instruments to travel instantly anywhere in the world from the short station internet connection located in Port Alberni via the University of Victoria data center.

Collected data will be used to respond to events such as storms, plankton blooms, fish migrations, earthquakes, tsunamis, and underwater volcanic eruptions, as they happen.

01/24/2008