The MARS cable will provide continuous power from the Moss Landing (California) shore station to the bottom of the Monterey Bay sea floor. The cable contains copper electrical conductor that will provide up to 10 kilowatts (KW) of power to instruments, experiments, robots, and video cameras on the ocean floor. It also contains strands of optical fiber that will provide up to two gigabits (GB) per second of data from the ocean floor to researchers back on the mainland.

The 32 miles (52 kilometers) of cable will allow oceanographers for the first time to monitor and control instruments, experiments, and other devices on a 24/7 basis. Managed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the cable is buried about three feet below the ocean floor, which is about 2,923 feet (891 meters) below the surface of Monterey Bay.

In the past, researchers had to rely on a battery power source and store their data for later recovery to scientists, a process that was unreliable and slow. Oceanographers state that it was often easier to transmit data from an interplanetary spacecraft than to communicate with an instrument deep on the floor of one of the Earth’s oceans. This condition will change with the use of the MARS cable and observatory.

The MARS observatory is expected to be completed later in 2007. The project is hugely important for further deep-sea observations because once completed and used by scientists around the world, other larger and more complex facilities will be built to better explore the underwater life in the oceans and other waters of the Earth. Eventually, all such facilities will be linked up into an interwoven global network to enable scientists to study characteristics of the oceans, better understand and predict ocean conditions and changes, and better utilize ocean resources.

The Home Web page of the MARS observatory is: http://www.mbari.org/mars/.

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