SBIR-STTR Award

Deep sea exploration and retrieval of biological and geological samples is an expensive undertaking. Apart from the cost of designing and building vehicles for these functions, ship operations to support deep dives of piloted or remote-operated vehicles are only within reach of a few governmental and large private organizations. Autonomous-operated vehicles are less expensive. However, due to inefficient acoustic communications they are difficult to locate and control. We will design and test a new generation of deep-sea craft that will substantially reduce costs of sample collection. These vehicles will require small to modest support vessels, be simple to operate, readily controlled and tracked, and have efficient communication systems. They will be unmanned, eliminating the risk of injury and the need to maintain a pressure hull. The room saved can be used for sampling and instrumentation. The proposed vehicles will permit many more small organizations and businesses to participate in the future economic development of deep-sea natural resources.

Potential Commercial Applications:
The deep sea is largely unexplored, but evidence suggests that there are a large number of undescribed microorganisms that thrive under extreme physical conditions (high salt and temperature, low temperature, and in the presence of toxic metals). Technology that enables exploration and retrieval of new microorganisms capable of growing in extreme environments will be beneficial to the biotechnology industry. Characterization of undiscovered Archaea by NASA scientists will also benefit Origin-of-Life studies. New industrial products and drugs could be developed from genomic information obtained from these organisms or extracted directly by culturing them. Exploration and sampling technology can also be applied to the identification and location of important minerals that will hasten the development of deep sea mining.

Deep sea exploration and retrieval of biological and geological samples is an expensive undertaking. Operation of submersibles or ROVs is only within reach of a few governmental and large private organizations. The objective of Phase-I was to design and test a new generation of deep sea craft that, if successful, would substantially reduce costs of deep sea exploration and sample collection. Phase-I investigations were highly successful and strongly support the feasibility of the proposed new vehicle concepts. In Phase-II we will design and build a vehicle based on the new technology and use it to sample cold methane seeps for the presence of novel microorganisms. The application of this design for deep sea exploration and the discovery of new thermal vent fields in search of undiscovered microorganisms will reduce costs and permit small organizations and businesses to participate in the development of deep sea natural resources. This technology supports NASA programs in Astrobiology and could be adapted to the search for extant and extinct life forms below frozen water on the surface of Europa (or other planetary bodies) or to the study of Archaea to help understand the origin-of-life. POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS The deep sea is largely unexplored, but evidence suggests that there are large numbers of, as yet, undescribed microorganisms that thrive under extreme conditions of high and low temperature, high pressure, and high concentrations of salt and toxic metals. Technology that enables exploration and retrieval of new microorganisms capable of growing in these environments will be beneficial in biotechnology applications and other industries. Characterization of newly discovered Archaea by NASA scientists will also benefit Origin-of-Life studies. Extremophiles are an important source of industrial enzymes, including those used to generate ethanol from biomass, a potentially important source of renewable energy whose development would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. New industrial products and drugs could be developed from genomic information of extremophiles or extracted directly by culturing the organisms. Exploration and sampling technology can also be applied to the identification and location of important minerals that will hasten the development of deep sea mining