Sea-Kit's USV Maxlimer is prepared for despatch to the Pacific
Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai's eruption caused one of the fiercest volcanic explosions in more than a century as gas-rich magma met cold seawater.
It sent a plume of ash and vapour halfway to space and generated a tsunami that swept across the Pacific.
The uncrewed surface vessel will gather data to help researchers understand precisely what happened.
Called Maxlimer, the 12m-long robot based in Essex, England, will spend several weeks directly on top of Hunga-Tonga's submerged opening, or caldera, mapping its current shape.
It will also lower cameras and instruments to measure environmental conditions, such as the oxygen content of seawater and its turbidity, or cloudiness. These are factors that would impact marine life.
Maxlimer can be controlled from anywhere on the planet via satellite
Sea-Kit International, the small British company that developed Maxlimer, is able to monitor and control the USV from anywhere. And during its survey, to take place in June, mission operations will be run out of the firm's headquarters in the village of Tollesbury on the Essex coast.
That's a separation of 16,000km (10,000 miles). It's all done over satellite.
The project is being funded by the Nippon Foundation of Japan and organised by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), together with Seabed2030, which is an international effort to properly chart Earth's ocean floor.
NIWA will begin the investigations around the volcano this month using its Research Vessel Tangaroa.
It will deploy a multitude of instruments to measure water properties and to retrieve samples from the seafloor.
But the crewed ship will not be permitted to spend extended periods over the caldera. Only Maxlimer will be allowed to do that - for obvious reasons.
NIWA's RV Tangaroa will set sail next week to begin the survey project
"Other vessels taking part would struggle to get health and safety sign-off. But an uncrewed surface vessel can do 'the dull, the dirty and the dangerous'; and this is potentially quite dangerous," explained Wendy Hems, the mission lead for Sea-Kit.
"Obviously, we don't want to lose Maxlimer but it's safer for people to do it this way and we're going to get a lot of data because of it," she told BBC News.
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Source: BBC
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