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Comment by ainiriand | Hacker News Reader

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ainiriand·

It is a HiPAP device, used for submarine positioning:

https://www.kongsberg.com/globalassets/maritime/km-products/...

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High accuracy positioning for deep-sea structure placement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvxeWCoAZPw&feature=youtu.be

This plus the search pattern ("mowing the lawn") the ship is running in that area tells me that they're surveying the region accurately with sonar. There must be something on the bottom they want to find or build.

That's fairly near the location of Adria-1 submarine cable, so it's possible they are looking at something related to that.

At 1:22 of the video it shows a similar pattern being used. I'm assuming that pattern provides an inch by inch accuracy reading.

However, they could have just been testing it out in shallower waters near the coast before venturing into 1+ mile depths. Especially considering the mystery piece just recently arrived (according to the DHL tracking).

Are you all sure that is not the pattern of the ship looking for the device?

mhandley mentioned in a comment that the pattern tracking map is from today. It sounds like the device was returned prior to today, considering this article was published today.

The device was returned, but that pattern is the ship that likely carried/deployed the device, not the device itself.

Per another post that box is part of a fine grained positioning system, so I'd expect the ship deployed it then started doing whatever it was doing, and the fisherman trawled it up in the meantime.

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