North Puerto Rico Mapping + drop cam

Vessel: NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer; Expedition Dates: April 02, 2022 to April 26, 2022

Ports: San Juan, PR to Newport, RI

Project Principals: Shannon Hoy, NOAA/OAR/OER (Expedition Coordinator and Mapping Lead)

From April 4 - 28, 2022, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer sailed to support NOAA Ocean Exploration’s Puerto Rico Mapping and Deep-Sea Camera expedition (EX-22-03). The ship departed from San Juan, Puerto Rico. The mission objectives were two-fold: seafloor mapping in U.S waters offshore of Puerto Rico and testing deep-sea camera systems developed by the Multidisciplinary Instrumentation in Support of Oceanography (MISO) Facility at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) for potential integration into future NOAA Ocean Exploration operations. The primary mapping area of the expedition was the Muertos Trough region and surrounding seamounts in U.S. Caribbean waters around Puerto Rico. In addition, a transit over the 8,000 m deep Puerto Rico Trench was used to test the limits of the new Kongsberg EM 304 MKII multibeam sonar that was installed in 2021. Upon completion of mapping in the priority areas, the expedition focused on testing the integrated deep-sea camera and conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) system to support a number of mission objectives through simultaneous imaging and sampling of the water column. The last portion of the expedition consisted of mapping the high seas and offshore waters of the U.S. East Coast while transiting to the final destination of Newport, Rhode Island.