Our Clients Do Cool Stuff  

Our business allows us to work with people and companies that do extraordinary things. Marcus Gary with Zara Environmental is one of those exceptional people and Stone Aerospace is one of those progressive companies!

One of the driving forces behind the intensely collaborative DEPTHX mission—in many ways its instigator—was Marcus Gary, a doctoral candidate in hydrogeology at the Jackson School of Geosciences. For many years, Gary has studied Sistema Zacatón -- a system of water-filled sinkholes in northeastern Mexico including the deepest, Cenote Zacatón. He's tried to understand how the sinkholes formed and how they evolve over time.

At a barbecue in Austin, Texas in about 2002, Gary asked Bill Stone, a world famous cave diver, engineer and alumnus of the Jackson School of Geosciences, if it would be possible to build a robot to explore the Mexican cave system. The data a robot could collect about the internal structures of the sinkholes and environmental parameters in the water, Gary reasoned, would help hydrogeologists understand how the sinkholes form and evolve over time.

For Stone, the project sounded like a great way to develop robotic technologies that might one day be useful in the search for life in space. NASA thought so too and funded the three-year, $5 million DEPTHX mission. For NASA, the long-term target is Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, which appears to harbor a vast salt water ocean with the potential to support life. As a stepping stone toward such a mission, NASA is funding the ENDURANCE expeditions to Antarctica's Lake Bonney in late 2008 and late 2009 using the technology from the DEPTHX robot.

DEPTHX was built during 2006 at Stone Aerospace in Austin, Texas. Preliminary dives took place at the Applied Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, and under outdoor conditions at the Quarries, a swimming hole owned by Austin's Hyde Park Baptist Church.

One of the distinctive qualities of the 3,300-pound, computerized, underwater vehicle is that it makes its own decisions. With more than 100 sensors, 36 onboard computers, and 16 thrusters and actuators, DEPTHX decides where to swim, which samples to collect, and how to get home, based on maps that the probe draws during each dive.

By January 2007, team members from The University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University, Southwest Research Institute, Colorado School of Mines, and Stone Aerospace were ready to head to Mexico to continue testing DEPTHX, the world's only semi-autonomous cave diving robot.

Marcus Gary's online blog is really very interesting! The best part of my job is to get to know others with interesting jobs and live life vicariously through them!