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Jules Verne famously wrote the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but a Canadian inventor has made the idea of underwater exploration more science fact than fiction.
Phil Nuytten has created flexible diving gear, called an Exosuit, that enables humans to explore 1,000ft below the sea in relative comfort.
Dr Nuytten, president of North Vancouver, B.C.’s Nuytco Research Ltd, believes his hard-metal diving suit, described as a ‘submarine’ will lead to further advances in his field.
He told the Huffington Post: “This is a submarine that you wear. When you climb into that suit, you close the hatch on the surface and in the suit the pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch, same as you and I are both at right now, and it never increases. So you are never, ever exposed to any more pressure than you were designed and built to handle,” he said.
The futuristic-looking suit, which bears a striking likeness to the Toy Story character Buzz Lightyear, has 18 joints in the arms and legs, which allow the diver to move as naturally as possible underwater.
Nuytco Research described the suit as ‘a fully-certified submarine in the shape of a human’ and is designed to enable a diver to explore deep waters without spending days in a decompression chamber afterwards.
It has its own life support system, which can supply a diver with oxygen for 50 hours, while a fibre optic tether allows the diver to communicate with a team on the surface.
The tether also acts as a way to monitor life-support systems, sonar management and communications – as well as HD video footage.
To make navigation easier, the suit boasts four thrusters with 1.6 horsepower each on the basic model of the suit but the number can be boosted to eight.
Much like a car, the suit can be customised to suit the user’s needs. Options include grippers, claws and optional LED lights.
The suit, which costs $600,000 (BD226,000), will presumably be used by research scientists, commercial diving companies, military organisations and intrepid explorers.
“Now we’re looking forward to getting the swimming model out as a ‘lite’ version of the Exosuit deep-water work system,” the company said.
Dr Nuytten and his team are currently training astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to pilot the DeepWorker Submersibles for the NASA Extreme Environment Operations (NEEMO) project, a multi-year research project.
NEEMO presents an opportunity to advance the long-term objective of human exploration of near-earth asteroids by combining research on life in extreme environments with high fidelity training in an underwater, remote field setting. The information gained from this analogue project will help to improve the knowledge base, tools and techniques for future human space exploration.
