Petrel-X
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Overview
Chinese underwater glider that dived to 10,619 m in the Mariana Trench, a world record for gliders.
Petrel-X is a hadal-class underwater glider developed by Tianjin University with China's Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology in Qingdao. Like other gliders it has no propeller for cruising: it changes its buoyancy to sink and rise, using its wings to glide forward on long saw-tooth paths while sampling the water. In 2020 two Petrel-X gliders worked for six days in the Challenger Deep and one reached 10,619 m, the deepest dive recorded by an underwater glider. A later version, Petrel-XPLUS, can pitch straight up or down, letting it hover over one spot or drift with currents in narrow trenches.
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Co-developed by Tianjin University and the Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao). In a six-day deployment in the Challenger Deep announced in July 2020, two gliders made 45 profiles, three of them below 10,000 m (10,245, 10,347 and 10,619 m), beating the 8,213 m record a Petrel glider set in 2018. A 2022 paper describes the Petrel-XPLUS fitted with a dual-eccentric mechanism that extends its pitch range to plus or minus 90 degrees. The wider Petrel (Haiyan) family also set a 141-day, 3,619.6 km endurance mark in the South China Sea in 2018.
