EARTH
It doesn’t look like a typical robot. About half a meter across and 9 meters long, a new, super-high-tech submarine ROV, unveiled Tuesday in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, strongly resembles … well, a big yellow cigar.
But this unusual design has a particular purpose: to bore a hole 800 meters deep into the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica and explore the mysterious waters beneath the ice. Once under the shelf, the robot goes through a Transformer phase: The cigar opens into a diamond shape and then closes into its horizontal “flight mode,” prepared to plumb the depths.
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