The ORCA EITS (Eye in the sea) has been deployed at 880m. They have a bunch of videos of what it has captured so far, as well as a live feed.
The EITS plugs into the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS) which consists of a 52-km undersea cable that carries data and power to a “science node” 891 meters (2,923 feet) below the surface of Monterey Bay off the coast of California. More than eight different science experiments can be attached to this main hub and additional experiments can be daisy-chained from the main hub.
Which is a pretty cool idea since they can now run experiments for long periods of time. Previously they could only deploy experiment platforms, such as the EITS, for a maximum of 2 days due to limited battery life. The EITS is planed to be deployed from 3 to to 6 months at a time.
Since there is no light below 200m, the EITS uses a black and white camera and a red-light (which is invisible to most of the deep-sea critters) for extra illumination.
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- Photo of the ORCA EITS
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- Overview of MARS
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- The MARS hub