After the successful voyage to the moon, Indian scientists are getting ready to send three people 6,000 metres under the sea in a home-built submersible to search for rare minerals and precious metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese. This expedition is called Project Samudrayaan.
The Matsya 6000 submersible, which has been in development for almost two years, will conduct its initial sea trials in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of Chennai. After the Titan sank in June 2023 while transporting tourists to the Titanic debris in the North Atlantic Ocean, engineers are looking more closely at the ship's design.
National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) scientists, who are developing Matsya 6000, reviewed the design, materials, testing, certification, redundancy, and standard operating procedures. The Samudrayaan mission is underway as part of the Deep Ocean Mission. We will be conducting sea trials at 500 metres depth in the first quarter of 2024," said M Ravichandran, secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences. The mission is expected to be realised by 2026. Only the US, Russia, Japan, France and China have developed manned submersibles.
Matsya 6000 will examine the chemosynthetic biodiversity in hydrothermal vents and low-temperature methane seeps in the ocean in addition to hunting for nickel, cobalt, manganese, hydrothermal sulphides and gas hydrates.
NIOT director G A Ramadass said they have designed and developed a 2.1-metre-diametre sphere for Matsya 6000 to carry three people. The sphere will be made of 80-mm-thick titanium alloy to withstand 600 bar pressure (600 times greater than the pressure at sea level) at 6,000 metres depth. The vehicle is designed to operate for 12 to 16 hours at a stretch, but the oxygen supply will be available for 96 hours.
"Except for the sphere, we have redundancy for everything. Sometimes double, sometimes triple redundancy. An official sea trial will be certified, and we have gone with DNV- GL for certification. We will also follow standard operating procedure such as deploying the submersible from a ship, which will remain on the surface right above the submersible for easy communication with the underwater vehicle," the NIOT director said.