Services Provided

One of the primary objectives of Scientific Support Services is to provide effective pre-cruise planning and preparation. Initial contact is made with the Chief Scientist six to eighteen months prior to departure of a cruise. This serves to acquaint the Chief Scientist with the shared use instrumentation available, costs associated with their use, special ship capabilities or limitations, and services offered by MTG. At the same time, potential equipment scheduling conflicts or deficiencies may be determined and acted upon with a reasonable amount of lead-time. New equipment or upgrades to existing equipment that may be needed for cruises are considered for NSF Instrumentation or Scientific Support Equipment Proposals. The Chief Scientist is frequently contacted as the departure date for the cruise approaches in order to keep both the Chief Scientist and ship operations personnel informed of any changes in requirements or availability of equipment. The pre-cruise planning functions are conducted by the combined efforts of the Scientific Liaison Officer, the Marine Technology Program Assistant and Marine Operations Coordinator, and the assigned Marine Technicians.

Preparation of equipment prior to each cruise is performed by the Marine Technicians assigned to the cruise. These tasks include routine maintenance and calibrations as required. Equipment requiring sophisticated non-routine calibrations is shipped to the appropriate calibration centers.

At sea, the Marine Technicians’ task objectives fall into the following major categories:

· Maintaining shared use equipment in optimum condition and continuously monitoring instrumentation data acquisition quality. For example, technicians routinely analyze salinity samples and introduce standards into various pieces of instrumentation to verify sensor stability and accuracy.

· Assuring safe and proper equipment usage. Technicians train scientific personnel in operation of instrumentation with which they may be unfamiliar. In their zest for obtaining data many scientists will not take into consideration the needs of the next scientist that will require the equipment on the next cruise. It is the technician’s responsibility to monitor the operation of instrumentation use to make sure it is being operated properly and safely.

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