Page 162 - The Secret Museum

THE FIRST THING TO SET ‘eyes’ on the Titanic, 74 years after it crashed into an iceberg

in 1921 and sank to the bottom of the ocean, was a blue robot the size of a
lawnmower. Its name was Jason Junior, or JJ.

JJ is a small Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), also known as a flying eyeball.
Attached to a submersible called Alvin by an umbilical cord which transmits data,
Jason Junior was dropped to 3,660 metres below sea level. It moved into the wreck
and descended four levels down the grand staircase into the interior of the ship,
sending back haunting images of the promenade deck and a room with a chandelier,
still intact after years underwater. Robert Ballard, the leader of the undersea mission,

said it ‘was like landing on the moon’.

Ballard’s dream of exploring the Titanic was made possible by investment from
the US Navy. They wanted to investigate the location and state of two sunken naval
submarines, USS Thresher and Scorpion. Ballard was the man for the job, and he
agreed to do it in return for permission to use the same technology to look around the
Titanic.

Jason Junior now lives at the MIT Museum. But it’s also underneath 2,745 metres
of water off the South American coast. When engineers at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) constructed it, they made several copies of each

part so that JJ could be reconfigured for its different missions. After looking around
the Titanic and the sunken submarines, JJ was adapted for other expeditions and
taken on a mission by WHOI. While out at sea, the barge carrying it sank and JJ
disappeared.

I spoke to Kurt Hasselbalch, curator of the Hart Nautical Collections at the MIT
Museum, who knows all about JJ. The Jason Junior kept in the museum’s stores is
made from the only surviving parts of the JJ left above the ocean. ‘We had WHOI
recreate a display version of Jason Junior out of the original frame and body, and a

few original parts,’ explained Kurt. It sits, inactive, on a shelf, among all kinds of
inventions and innovations. It’s not on display, because there are 400,000 objects in
the nautical section of the museum alone and there really isn’t room to display
everything at one time. Most objects are kept as a 3D reference library of ideas and
inventions.

As for the sunken version of JJ, it may yet be recovered. ‘We’re waiting for
someone to say “Hey! Let’s go get it.” It’ll probably be James Cameron …’

I imagine the director of the blockbuster film Titanic would be a good person for
the job. He has sent remote cameras into the Titanic to get footage of the interior, and
used footage of an ROV exploring the wreck for the opening sequence of his film.

More recently, in 2012, he went down into the Mariana Trench, on the day before
Titanic 3D premiered in London.

Kurt explained that the tale of Jason Junior is part of a bigger story about naval
technology. The navies of the world have state-of-the-art equipment: ‘We don’t even