According to the Foundation for Advanced Research (FPI), on May 8, 2020, at 10:34 p.m. Moscow time, the Russian autonomous uninhabited underwater vehicle Vitiaz landed at the bottom of the Mariana Trench . Vitiaz sensors registered a depth of 10,028 meters .
The Mariana Trench is the deepest known oceanic trench and the deepest place in the earth’s crust. It is located at the bottom of the northwestern Pacific, southeast of the Mariana Islands, near Guam. Its deepest point is called the Challenger Abyss with 11,034 m deep .
Vitiaz
The May 8 dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench was the first phase in Vitiaz’s series of experiments.
The mission lasted more than three hours, not counting the dive and the return to the surface. In addition, the device carried out the mapping, took photographs and recorded videos of the seabed , as well as studied the parameters of the marine environment. According to the Foundation:
Unlike the Kaiko (Japan) and Nereus (USA) devices that previously operated in this area, the Vitiaz device works completely autonomously. Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence elements in the vehicle’s control system, it can independently navigate obstacles and find a way out of a limited space and solve other intellectual problems.
A year ago, the American Victor Vescovo set a new world record by arriving with his submersible at a depth of 10,935 meters in the cliffs of the Marianas, twenty meters more than the march that the filmmaker James Cameron had held since 2012.