UK Distributor for Exocetus Coastal Glider
UK-based Planet Ocean is distributing a new coastal glider from US Manufacturer Exocetus. The Exocetus glider has been renamed the Exocetus Coastal Glider and will be manufactured in the Exocetus facility at Anchorage, Alaska, USA. The glider is based upon the earlier Littoral Glider from ANT (formerly Alaska Native Technologies LLC), developed under funding from the Office of Naval Research during a 6-year period.
The initial primary market for these Exocetus Coastal Gliders is coastal regions where conditions of hypoxia are prevalent during the warm months of the year. There are more than 200 regions of eutrophication and hypoxia throughout the coastal areas of the world. Another near-term market for the Exocetus Coastal Glider will be for research institutes studying ocean acidification.
Exocetus gliders are designed to operate in coastal waters where high currents and large water densities occur due mostly to the fresh water entering these coastal waters from rivers. Legacy gliders (the Slocum, the Seaglider, and the Spray), which were developed over the past 15 years and were designed for open-ocean operations, do not have the capability to operate in coastal waters due to design limitations. Unlike legacy gliders, the Exocetus Coastal Glider was designed to easily add more sensors without any, or minimal, changes to the glider housing.
The Exocetus Coastal Glider has a buoyancy engine more than 7 times larger (5 litres) than the legacy gliders which allow operations over wide variations of water densities by use of a proprietary adaptive ballasting system. The ballasting system allows the Exocetus Coastal Glider to be deployed without the pre-ballasting requirement of traditional gliders. This larger buoyancy engine also permits the Exocetus Coastal Glider to easily operate in waters with up to 2 knots of current. The Exocetus Coastal Glider can operate down to depths of 200 metres which is more than adequate for most, if not all, coastal applications.
Terry Sloane, Planet Ocean’s managing director, commented that the EXOCETUS-CG is the ideal vehicle to carry the high-performance instruments from our other partners especially, the CTDs, Nutrient sensors, the new SeaFET pH sensor and of course the ic-Listen smart hydrophones for anthropogenic and sea mammal studies. It fills the gap between small AUV platforms and blue water gliders.
