Who is jacques piccard

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You can Login or register here. Your web browser is outdated. Please use a modern web browser for a better experience. Chrome Firefox Edge. Ashworth, Jr. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw umkc. Scientist of the Day - Jacques Piccard July 28, Nov Dec Apr 7. View Calendar. At 10, metres 35, feet , located in the Mariana Trench, this is the deepest point on the globe. Inspired by his father, Auguste, an adventurer and engineer who in became the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere, Jacques looked not to the sky for his exploration but to the greatest depths of the ocean.

At a time when Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau were inspiring others to follow them into the shallow sub-aquatic realm, and only two and a half years after the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit, Piccard made the deepest possible human descent into the abyss.

Today, when we have a manned space station in orbit and send robotic missions to Mars, it is easy to overlook the magnitude of Piccard's feat. In space, the pressure difference between the inside and outside of a spacecraft is one atmosphere. At the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the Trieste had to support 1, times that; the equivalent pressure of more than eight tonnes per square inch.

To make such a pioneering dive to these extreme depths required the utmost courage and determination. Piccard and Walsh's moment of greatest resolve came four hours into the Challenger Deep dive.

At a depth of 9,m, with a resounding bang, one of their Perspex windows cracked. Remarkably, they chose to continue their descent, arriving at the bottom 40 minutes later. Following the success of the bathyscaphe, Auguste and Jacques then began developing a "mesoscaphe"-a ship that could operate at depths of up to 2, feet.

Piccard envisioned it as a tourist submarine, and the first mesoscaphe, Auguste Piccard, carried more than 30, passengers into Lake Geneva at the Swiss National Exhibition in Working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Piccard then developed a second vessel, the Ben Franklin, for the Gulf Stream Mission, which studied the physical and biological features of the Gulf Stream on its month-long voyage from Florida to Nova Scotia in His account of that voyage was published in The Sun Beneath the Sea.

During the 's, Piccard formed the Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes and began warning about the dangers of pollution and overfishing. His new submersibles included Forel, launched in , which made more than dives in European lakes for scientific, industrial, and recovery missions.

Although he continued his research for governments, universities, and the police, his efforts in later years included developing passenger vessels. He developed more than 40 innovative designs for commercial sightseeing submersibles, of which half a dozen were built. Piccard also became a founder of the Exploration Society of America, an international travel group. Piccard wrote in "That man is headed for ultimate adventure at the basement of earth, there is no doubt at all.

Political attention and funding were soon diverted from ocean exploration to the space race, and the benefits of deep-sea expeditions were not believed to offset their enormous costs. He remains optimistic, however, that a new generation of deep-sea exploration technology may enable humans to return to the Challenger Deep: "We opened the door, and now we must go and see what's behind the door. Piccard continues to develop and build submersibles, partly as a way of increasing awareness of environmental threats to the world's seas.

Meanwhile, the Piccard family legacy of adventure and exploration is being continued by his son Bertrand, who received international attention in for his participation in several team attempts to circle the globe by balloon.

The family was also featured in a public television series, "The Adventurers. All rights reserved.