A New Era of Multidisciplinary Expeditions: Recent Opportunities and Progress to Advance the Telepresence Paradigm

Kasey Lynn Cantwell1, Brian RC Kennedy1, Mashkoor Malik2, Lindsay McKenna Gray3, Kelley Elliott2, Meme Lobecker4, Jared Drewniak5, Brendan Reser6, Emily Crum2,7 and David Lovalvo8, (1)NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Silver Spring, MD, United States, (2)NOAA, Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Silver Spring, MD, United States, (3)Earth Resources Technology Inc., Silver Spring, MD, United States, (4)NOAA, Boulder, CO, United States, (5)NOAA, Narragansett, RI, United States, (6)NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Riverside Technologies, Stennis Space Center, MS, United States, (7)NOAA (ERT, Inc), Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Key West, FL, United States, (8)Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration, Mystic, CT, United States
Abstract:
Since it’s commissioning in 2008, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer has used telepresence technology both as an outreach tool and as a new way to conduct interdisciplinary science expeditions. NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) has developed a set of collaboration tools and protocols to enable extensive shore-based participation. Telepresence offers unique advantages including access to a large pool of expertise on shore and flexibility to react to new discoveries as they occur. During early years, the telepresence experience was limited to Internet 2 enabled Exploration Command Centers, but with advent of improved bandwidth and new video transcoders, scientists from anywhere with an internet connection can participate in a telepresence expedition. Scientists have also capitalized on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc.) by sharing discoveries to leverage the intellectual capital of scientists worldwide and engaging the general public in real-time. Aside from using telepresence to stream video off the ship, the high-bandwidth satellite connection allows for the transfer of large quantities of data in near real-time. This enables not only ship – shore data transfers, but can also support ship – ship collaborations as demonstrated during the 2015 and 2014 seasons where Okeanos worked directly with science teams onboard other vessels to share data and immediately follow up on features of interest, leading to additional discoveries. OER continues to expand its use of telepresence by experimenting with procedures to offload roles previously tied to the ship, such as data acquisition watch standers; prototyping tools for distributed user data analysis and video annotation; and incorporating in-situ sampling devices. OER has also developed improved tools to provide access to archived data to increase data distribution and facilitate additional discoveries post-expedition.