AURORA / Deep sea exploration systems
Crewed submersibles rated to 11,000 metres, built for science, seabed mapping and film. Three platforms, one pressure standard, and a support crew that has logged every metre of it.
Chapter 01 / The descent
Every AURORA platform is certified in the zones below before it ever reaches the bottom. Scroll to follow the water down.
Current depth
0M
Sunlight
The last zone where the ocean still behaves like a surface. Colour drains away by 15 metres, warmth by 50.
Plankton blooms, kelp canopy, the first cold currents of the day cycle.
Chapter 02 / The fleet
Select a vehicle to load its certification data, then open any marked component to read the specification behind the drawing.
Select a marker to open the component specification
A two-stage titanium sphere with an external syntactic foam pack, rated for full working depth on the continental shelf and the abyssal plain. NEREID stays on station for four days without a surface recharge.
Full depth workhorse
The platform most of our missions run on.
Chapter 03 / Field notes
Working notes from the operations room, written by the people who ride the vehicles and sign the dive plans.
At 1,100 bar the hull compresses enough to lose a few millimetres of diameter. Pilots report a faint change in the cabin note. Instruments do not care, ears do.
Do you need a submersible to map the sea floor. No. You need a sonar that survives the trip, and someone patient with a line. We build the second half of that sentence.
A brine pool on the abyssal plain is a lake with its own shoreline, held in place by density. The boundary can be sharp enough to see from ten metres away, and it is one of the few places down there that behaves like the surface.
Warm light scatters in water and comes back looking like fog. Our arrays run at 5,600 K so the beam stays a beam, and so the camera can see colour that a warm lamp would wash out.
Common questions
Pilot, systems operator, vessel crew, fuel, insurance for the dive plan, and a post dive data package with the full 8K and telemetry archive.
Chapter 04 / Missions
Selected operations from the last three years, with the numbers that matter and the parts that stayed on the seabed.
Forty-one days in the Java Sea trench, mapping the northern wall with HADAL and two surface tenders. The team placed fourteen pressure loggers on ledges that had never been reached and brought back nine hours of continuous 8K footage from the floor.
Twelve months of inspection work for three transatlantic operators, using NEREID to image every splice chamber and the surrounding seabed. Fault classification moved from sonar guesswork to frame accurate records with a manipulator in the loop.
A six month archive of deep reef margins in water that science had only seen from a distance. TERN covered the wall at 1,800 metres a day while a larger platform drilled the carbonate cores that hold the growth record.
Chapter 05 / Systems
Four systems carry every dive. Everything else on the vehicle is replaceable, and everything else is designed around these.
Certification
Every hull is a single piece of forged titanium, machined, stress relieved and pressure cycled in house. No welds on the critical path.
Variable ballast trim holds the platform neutral in the water column, so a manipulator can rest on a sample without the hull fighting it.
Lithium iron phosphate packs, redundant distribution, and a thermal envelope that keeps the chemistry inside its safe band at depth.
A single pilot commands the vehicle through a six axis console that mirrors the manipulator position in the camera frame.
Chapter 06 / Contact
Tell us what you need to see and how deep you need to go. An operations planner replies within one working day with a provisional dive plan, a vessel option and a cost range.