Quick question for the hive mind: was WHOI’s Sentry the first to run a fully autonomous lawnmower grid over an active hydrothermal vent field (EPR, about 2200 m, 2009-ish), or did Autosub3 or MBARI’s Dorado claim that milestone earlier? Settling a post-dive bet in the workshop after calibrating a BlueView 900 kHz on a 3,000 m skid.
Set alerts; these real-time posts disappear. I landed one via RemoteOK: https://remoteok.com, but verify contract length.
Pretty sure Sentry hit EPR in “2009-ish”; Dorado’s Axial grids were later. Check R2R Atlantis AT15 cruise logs.
I’d check Sentry’s 2009 EPR cruise report; “lawnmower” nav plots are archived — @yoerger confirm?
Leaning Sentry for EPR 2009, but if we’re talking “first ever,” ABE did proper lawnmower at Endeavour years earlier — @yoerger would know. Easiest way to settle it: pull the Sentry dive summaries from R2R and look for mission notes flagged “area survey” with tight 50–75 m lane spacing; that’s exactly what I’ve used when aligning a BlueView 900 kHz on a 3,000 m skid. So Sentry likely holds the EPR-first, with ABE as the earlier precedent elsewhere.