Co-starring… Kongsberg Maritime’s HUGIN AUV
Kongsberg Maritime‘s HUGIN AUV is featured in an intriguing new documentary – ‘Roald Amundsen – Lost in the Arctic’ – which investigates the disappearance of Roald Amundsen and his Latham 47 sea-plane in the Barents Sea during a rescue mission in 1928.
The new film sees polar explorer Liv Arnesen and Per Arvid Tellemann, a former navy navigator and member of a commission that investigated Amundsen’s untimely death uncover the mystery on land, whilst the Norwegian Navy, aboard its vessel KNM Tyr, searches for the wreckage of Amundsen’s plane using a Kongsberg Maritime HUGIN 1000 AUV and HISAS 1030 synthetic aperture sonar.
Norwegian Roald Amundsen was one of the great explorers of the early 20th Century, having been the first to reach the South Pole in December 1911 and is also credited with the first verified attempt to cross the arctic in an airship in May 1926. Amundsen vanished along with six others when the Latham 47 they were flying crashed during a rescue mission to save the Italian general and aviation engineer Umberto Nobile, whose airship Italia had gone down returning from the North Pole.
The hunt for Amundsen’s plane was co-organized by the Norwegian Aviation Museum, the Norwegian Navy and Context TV, a German television production company specializing in documentaries related to scientific-historical expeditions and explorations, with main emphasis on the underwater segment. The expedition started in August 2009, with HUGIN 1000 being used as the primary tool to search for the famous Norwegian arctic explorer’s airplane over an area measuring 34 square nm.
HUGIN 1000 is a state-of-the-art AUV with a depth capacity down to 1000 m, an operational speed of 4 knots and the ability to stay deployed at sea for 18 hrs non-stop with all sensors operating. The Norwegian Navy’s HUGIN 1000 is primarily used for mine hunting so along with a payload that includes the Kongsberg Maritime developed HISAS 1030 synthetic aperture sonar, it is the ideal tool for hunting plane wreckage over such a large area. If the Latham had been in the search area, then the HUGIN would have found it.