⁣ Launching and retrieving the sub is a huge ritual. People have to clear off the back deck, put on their safety gear, and the deckhands hop in the Zodiacs to help hook/unhook the sub (someone has to physically jump in the water and it doesn't matter if we're in Antarctica or the Bahamas). Meanwhile, the captain has to maneuver the ship so that it doesn't accidentally crash into the sub, which is basically a giant glass (PERSPEX) ball. Before that even happens, there's tons of planning in Mission Control about where they want to dive, looking at underwater maps—if there are any. A lot of people know by now that in some ways we have better maps about the surface of Mars than our own ocean floor. Like most ships, the Alucia has a mechanism to do what's called "multibeam mapping." It shoots a fan of acoustic beams down into the water column that allow us to build a visualization of what is down there. #ShotonRED ⁣ ⁣ [Post 6 of 10. Behind the scenes of #BluePlanet2 with OceanX.]⁣