On Thursday, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled the “Exosuit,” a diving system that scientists hope will broaden their ability to study unknown species of bioluminescent and biofluorescent creatures at the depths of the oceans, instead of having to bring them up to the surface, as is the standard practice.

According to the scientists behind the project, the light communications of these little-studied specimens may offer new, valuable insight for biomedical research related to cancer cell tagging and the study of brain activity.

Measuring at about 6½ feet tall and weighing more than 530 pounds, the contraption can safely carry a human diver 1,000 feet below the water. At that depth, an unprotected human would be subjected to about 30 times the normal surface pressure.

The suit itself took about 15 years to develop. It is an update of the 1979 diving system known as the “JIM suit.”



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The JIM suit, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

The modern-day Exosuit cost about $600,000 to make and comes with an action figure’s list of cool accessories: a fiber-optic tether, topside control instrumentation and a custom-made remotely operated vehicle (aka a DeepReef-ROV) to aid with fish data collection. The entire set of equipment cost about $1.3 million to build.

What sets it apart is the ease with which scientists can move around in it underwater. Divers can rotate the suit’s limbs thanks to its red, oil-filled rotary joints. Each hand pod (which is connected to a claw), has a manipulator, which project coordinator Michael Lombardi says are relatively easy to control.

“It can be rather difficult, but also very intuitive,” Lombardi, who is also the museum’s dive safety officer, said at the presentation. “We did a training exercise in July, and an individual with very little dive experience, after about an hour in the suit, was able to pick a dime up off the ground. At first glance, this is a big, clunky thing; you think, how could you possibly do anything delicate? But to pick up a dime — there’s also no reason that we also can’t collect a delicate jellyfish down the road.”

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The suit allows researchers to work below water for up to five hours and will come with a collection of specially modified hand tools: jars, bags, scalpels, syringes and a special suction device to capture animals. The idea is to carefully tease these delicate specimens into a container that can then be placed in front of a sophisticated camera for imaging.

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