Great Salt Lake Sampling
There are plenty of times when a job in a challenging environment, best suited for robots, falls on our plate. We are happy to deploy our tools to help you out in those scenarios. Sometimes, however, there is a special feature of the job site that makes uncrewed vessel inadequate. Distance is a factor that is particularly hard to overcome.
We were approached by a lithium mining company about using our tried and true UAV system for acquiring physical water samples and chemical profiles; we were immediately intrigued. The job site was the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake, a portion of this massive inland sea that is not accessible to the general public. The problem was the sampling plan covered over 200 square miles of open salt water in the middle of winter, far too great of distance and harsh conditions for a UAV with a 20 minute flight time...
After discussions, we brought Plan B to the table...
Solution: A crewed vessel that we moved across miles of mudflats, pulled with a side-by-side UTV, out to the edge of the shallow salt water, manually unload equipment and a high flotation zodiac boat from the trailer, drag through hundreds of yards of shallow water until its deep enough to float, drop the outboard motor in the water and make a 60+ mile loop collecting liter jugs of water and sonde profiles along the way.
Travelling through this wintery environment, with such vast distances the water and sky meet with no boundary, required extra safety precautions. In addition to the sampling gear and GPS navigation systems, we had full immersion dry suits, flares, radios (no cell service) and a variety of emergency tools to get us out of any unforeseen problems. All said and done, we collected (21) 2L samples and another 10L of control at various depths across 10 locations, including a sonde profile at each stop. A complex job where adventure was merely an added benefit!