A successor to the original Rutgers University “Scarlet Knight” autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has crossed the continental shelf of the U.S. and is well on its way along the Gulf Stream in its fourth week of an eight-month voyage across the Atlantic

Launched on 27 April from the New Jersey coast, the glider, somewhat more formally known by its model sequence designator — RU27 — is operated by a group of students at the Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory (COOL) at Rutgers University.

Every six or eight hours, the glider surfaces to get a GPS location and send any data it has gathered, along with its position, back to the control room at Rutgers, using a satellite link

build the experience base for navigation along the ocean’s many complicated currents

Periodically, the flight controllers turn on Scarlet Knight’s scientific sensors and record a basic set of hydrographic data, including temperature, salinity and derived density