Spray: Spray being deployed by Brian Guest, at WHOI, in 2004. Courtesy: Jeffrey Sherman Research Specialist and designer of the SOLO microstructure profiler and 'Spray.'

Think you could swim 2,484 nautical miles
(1 nautical mile = 1.15 miles) across the Atlantic Ocean? This month, Spray, will embark on its mission to swim from the southern tip of Greenland to the coast of Spain. Spray is an autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV for short, created by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

Spray's primary goals include:
1. completing the lengthy swim;
2. gathering signs of global warming;
3. enabling scientists to have a constant telepresence in the ocean

Spray will act as an “aquatic sentinel” collecting data on temperature, currents and salinity. This information will assist scientists in furthering their knowledge base pertaining the role oceans have on global climate. Dr. Russ Davis, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego stated "The key is that Spray can stay at sea for months at relatively low cost, allowing us to observe large-scale changes under the ocean surface that might otherwise go unobserved." If Spray completes this mission, the robot will break its personal record of 1,864 nautical miles for the longest distance ever traveled by an AUV. GO SPRAY!!!

Check out this graphical representation of Spray in action.

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