The sonar that HSI is towing 3.2 miles beneath the ship is called the SLH ProSAS-60, owned by SL Hydrospheric LLC, a company that Larsen still co-manages and co-founded in 2008 with the purpose of bringing the rarefied device to the deep-sea surveying market.

The Larsens’ company and groundbreaking technology emerged out of relative obscurity when the 6,000-pound sonar vehicle was used to help locate the F-1 rocket engines that powered Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket, which landed three American astronauts on the moon in 1969. On that expedition, Jay was an integral part of the search and recovery team led by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

The Synthetic Aperture Sonar works by sending acoustic pings off the ocean floor to form images with a resolution much higher than conventional sonar technology, and Kolter has an intimate understanding of its nuts and bolts.

“Kolter had been involved with the sonar since the beginning, even helping me solder up power supply boards on our pingpong table in the garage at points,” Jay said. “He has been out on vessels a few times but never anything close to this scale. So, he had about as good of a grasp on the system as anyone. He is fitting right in with the rest of the crew and doing a great job as an ET.”