We are making bigger and bigger plans to explore outer space.
We want to return to the moon, visit Mars for the first time and build human colonies on both.
We dream about space mining, searching for life on celestial bodies traversing the solar system and establishing contact with alien civilizations.
Meanwhile, we know virtually nothing about our planet, and on this occasion a project called Ocean Discovery XPRIZE was created, thanks to which by 2030 accurate maps of the entire seabed of our planet will be created.
They will allow us to learn the greatest secrets of a large part of a completely foreign space.
Knowledge of the deep sea will help us better understand the history of our planet, the current development of the delicate ecosystems of creatures inhabiting water bodies and the impact of the oceans on climate change, and vice versa. 19 research teams from around the world compete for the $ 7 million prize.
Oceanographers are tasked with preparing concepts for mapping the seabed using the most advanced devices in the world today, which will work in teams, in full autonomous mode.
The work of scientists is to consist only of further analysis of the obtained data. The first effects of scientists' work are created before our eyes.
Well, the autonomous ship built by Maxlimer and supervised by SEA-KIT has returned to the port of Plymouth in Great Britain.
It embarked on its mission to map the bottom of the Atlantic in July.
The work was supposed to proceed without interruption, but the CoVID-19 pandemic frustrated the scientists' plans a bit.
However, there is nothing bad that would not turn out to be good.
The autonomous boat, using a sonar attached to the hull, managed to map over 1,000 square kilometers of the continental shelf to a depth of about 1 kilometer. This is a huge achievement, but the best is yet to come.
The project shows that there is great potential in autonomous boats.
Thanks to them, we will be able to get to know the entire surface of our planet.
It is very important, because this knowledge will be necessary for us not only to shape our further expansion into more and more new territories on Earth, but also will be helpful in the exploration of foreign worlds, in which conditions similar to those on our planet may occur.
and the Japanese Nippon Foundation point out that the realization of this historic endeavor will not be easy, but the desire to discover the unknown is worth all the trouble.
After all, in the depths of the oceans, the most bizarre creatures that even the greatest philosophers have not dreamed are waiting to be discovered.
Some of them, recently discovered kilometers below the surface by oceanographers, appear to be representatives of species of marine creatures from alien planets.