Six-foot-five, 500-plus pounds of metal, yet nimble enough for its wearer to maneuver under the sea and study delicate luminescent jellyfish without harming them: This is the Exosuit, and this summer the hulking outfit will carry a scientist down to 1000 feet below the ocean's surface, to a remote place where glowing fish flash signals to one other through the dark.
Some of the scientists who will take Exosuit out into the field gathered at New York's American Museum of Natural History this morning. There, the suit will reside for museum patrons to admire until March 5. In the spring, the team will begin underwater tests in anticipation of the suit's summertime mission. This July, the Stephen J. Barlow Bluewater Expedition will use Exosuit to dive toward the canyons off the New England coast.
Exosuit is 15 years in the making, says Michael Lombardi, the museum's diving safety officer. The suit itself costs $600,000, and that total doubles when you include all the support equipment. But the suit will allow scientists unprecedented access to explore the ocean depths.
"People have dived to these depths and further just to say they've done it," Lombardi says. But whomever wears the Exosuit will be able to spend three to five hours at 1000 feet below sea level with normal surface pressure inside the suit. Exosuit has 18 oil-lubricated rotary joints that allow the wearer to move with grace, and despite its mass, the suit is "basically effortless to pilot in the water," Lombardi says. The diver will have access to a variety of gear, including scalpels, syringes, and suction tools to help them move delicate undersea creatures into the field of view of the diver's HD camera.
Machines can go down to these depths and take high-definition pictures of the strange and marvelous life there. So why build a million-dollar suit for a man? Vincent Pierbone of Yale University, a neuroscientist who will be on the mission this summer, stressed that there's still no machine that can match the observing power of a human explorer. No camera yet devised compares to what we're hauling around inside our heads. "You're actually there, immersed. I can't stress enough how important it is to bring your eyes," he says.
And why send a neuroscientist into the depths of the sea? Pierbone recounts the case of green fluorescent protein, which is naturally found in biofluorescent jellyfish. Since the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of GFP, scientists have used it as a marker of sorts, making cells in the body glow so that they can see biology in action in a non-invasive way. He hopes studying bioluminescent and biofluorescent life up close could lead to new such insights. John Sparks, the museum's curator of the Department of Ichthyology, says Exosuit exploration could answer old questions (and raise new ones) about exactly how the creatures of the deep use light to signal one another, and how new species develop in this largely unexplored region.
"We want to get down deeper and see these animals alive," he says.
Images: Andrew Moseman