Robot Cameras to Explore Sunken Titanic’s Interior

The U.S. Navy research ship Knorr, which discovered and photographed the wreckage of the British ocean liner Titanic last September, will sail again within two weeks to explore the sunken vessel’s interior with sophisticated video cameras, a scientist said Wednesday.

During a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, Robert D. Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts said a newly built underwater robot will be sent into a large hole in the Titanic’s cabin that originally had been covered by an ornate glass dome.

Under the dome was the elaborate grand staircase that led Titanic’s first-class passengers down into the most sumptuous parts of the liner. Photographs of the opening taken last September show that the staircase is missing.

Ballard, chief American scientist on the first expedition, said the new robot is small, maneuverable and outfitted with the latest in sensitive video cameras that can produce “broadcast quality” images. In effect, Ballard said, such cameras “can see in the dark.”

It is inky dark at the Titanic’s resting place--about 13,000 feet below the Atlantic’s surface on a canyon slope about 800 miles east of Cape Cod. The liner, the biggest and most luxurious of its day and touted as virtually unsinkable, scraped against an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. More than 1,500 lives were lost.

Ballard said he plans to dock a larger, mother robot near the hole in the cabin, then send the smaller robot inside.

How far inside? “Just enough,” Ballard said. “I’ve got 200 feet of tether, and I doubt seriously if I’ll put that much of it out.”

Similar robots were used last summer by two research ships--the Knorr and France’s Le Suroit--to jointly search 150 square miles of ocean floor for the 882-foot, 66,000-ton Titanic.