Atlas Parasound for Research Vessels
Atlas Hydrographic in Bremen has completed installation of the first of its latest Parasound DS-3 sub-bottom profiling and bathymetric survey systems aboard Maria S Merian, a new research vessel built by Kroeger Werft at its Rendburg yard under a project funded by the German Ministry of Education & Research in association with the States of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein.
Based at the Baltic Sea Research Institute in Warnemunde, the €55m (euros) vessel is due to begin service later this year. Its hull-mounted Parasound DS-3 system features multi-pulse operation and is capable of providing bottom penetration in excess of 200m while sampling data at up to 50 kHz frequency over depths down to 11,000m; the system is supplemented by a Parastore-3 software suite, an advanced visualisation, acquisition and processing facility for scientific analyses developed by Atlas Hydrographic in association with the University of Bremen’s Department of Marine Technology & Environmental Research. The suite permits differentiated evaluations of sub-bottom and water column details via a multi-window graphical user interface.
A second Parasound DS-3 system has also been commissioned for installation aboard the Alfred Wegener Institute’s double-hulled polar research icebreaker, Polarstern. Also capable of automatic acquisition of data for a wide range of bottom slopes and due to be installed next year, it will replace the vessel’s present DS-2 model.
