ITP42 Recovery Operations
After 6 months of excellent profiling data acquisition and telemetry, the battery pack in ITP 42 profiler inexplicably exhausted. Fortunately, the surface package continued to acquire GPS locations and send status back daily via the Iridium transmissions so that when the JOIS 2011 expedition approached the vicinity of the buoy in July 2011, recovery of the system could be attempted. Besides retrieving the hardware for refurbishment and reuse, the instrument is needed to determine the cause of the battery failure.
On the morning of July 31st, a helicopter reconnaissance was conducted and ITP 42 was located over 20 miles away from the ship sitting in melt pond. The IMB that was deployed near the ITP was still on the same icefloe, but the AOFB buoy was nowhere to be found. The IMB was still sending data, so was to be left undisturbed during the ITP recovery operation.
The ship arrived onsite in the afternoon and the Captain proceeded to expertly guide the vessel over the floe, so that it separated the ITP and left the IMB. The surface package was tagged by a crewmember using the manbasket, and the system methodically hauled onboard using the mooring winch. Within an hour, the profiler appeared perfectly undamaged resting on the bumper and was brought onboard. Later testing determined that the profiler functioned perfectly and that the failure could only be explained by a rare bad lithium battery pack.
More information and photos on the deployment operation are also available at: https://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=72896.
