Ensuring Safety and Evaluating Risks for Deep-Sea Missions
ECE/MIE Professor Hanumant Singh outlines the safety certifications and risk evaluations that go into deep-sea research missions in autonomous underwater vehicles. Despite last year’s OceanGate tragedy, another manned deep dive is planned to take place in the summer of 2026.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Tanner Stening. Main photo: Nearly a year after a submersible carrying five passengers imploded en route to the Titanic, another manned dive in the North Atlantic is reportedly in the works. GDA via AP Images
Another manned submersible trip to the Titanic is being planned. A year after the fatal implosion, just how safe are today’s vessels?
Nearly a year after a submersible carrying five passengers imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic, another manned deep dive in the North Atlantic is reportedly in the works.
The billionaire-funded trip would take two men — Larry Connor, a real estate investor, and Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Triton Submarines — down some 12,500 feet in the summer of 2026 on a vessel that Triton is designing, according to the New York Times.
It would be the first manned mission to the wreckage since the OceanGate submersible tragedy on June 18, 2023, an incident that shook the industry and garnered international attention.
Hanumant Singh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, has overseen the design of autonomous underwater vehicles. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
The pair say the acrylic-hubbed vessel would be the first of its kind to achieve such depths, and that they hope the trip would demonstrate that deep sea expeditions can be safely carried out.
But just how safe are today’s vessels, and who signs off on them? Northeastern Global News asked Hanumant Singh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, who has overseen the design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), to shed some light on the kind of tech needed to sustain a vessel at such depths.
Singh has personally traveled down to similar depths on the DSV Alvin, a deep-sea research vessel that he says is “the most successful submersible” ever built.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News