Europe’s First Remote Underwater Laboratory
Sitting at a depth of 2,450 meters off the shores of Toulon is an underwater laboratory controlled remotely on land.
The Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée (LSPM) used for multidisciplinary environmental research, operates through three junction boxes that retrieve data.
The underwater laboratory uses a 42-kilometer electro-optical cable to pair the boxes with a terrestrial power system.
One of the junction boxes is used for marine science. It measures oxygen, sea currents, water temperature, and pH levels.
The other two junction boxes use the ORCA neutrino detector hosted by the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) to allow for the detection of the direction and energy of neutrinos in the sea and sky.
The ORCA detector is an amalgamation of 2,070 spheres, with 31 detectors that will lay on the ocean floor.
The on-land Infrastructure includes a remote control room at the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille as well as a reception, showroom, and multimedia installments.
The main control room, located in La Seyne-sur-Mer, is used for data acquisition, connection processes to other control rooms and storage centers, and to monitor experiments in real time.
