Maximum Thrust 2003: A Movie That Will Make You Feel the Need for Speed

Consistent with this mission and responding to the "Ocean Challenges and Opportunities" as outlined in the new 2003 Ocean Engineering Strategic Plan, the revitalized department will focus its efforts on the following five specific thrust areas:

maximum thrust 2003 movie

Download File

With input of the faculty through interviews, the 2003 Visiting Committee, faculty meetings, and a full-day retreat, a new strategic plan will be drafted during the summer of 2003. Following the development of new department vision and mission statements, the Strategic Planning Committee identified the major challenges and opportunities facing Ocean Engineering and defined the five main thrust areas that the department plans to pursue over the next decade, as stated above, led by the development of a new educational infrastructure for educating the ocean engineers of the future and followed by four research thrust areas, representing contributions that the MIT Ocean Engineering Department is uniquely placed to lead, including Advanced Naval Architecture and Autonomous Marine Systems. At a May retreat, the faculty developed unanimous consensus around the thrusts and initiated the development of the plans of action and milestones for each thrust, which are key components of the Ocean Engineering Strategic Plan that will be presented to the administration in August 2003.

The ONR Geoclutter Program, for which Professor Makris is the chief scientist, is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, experimental/theoretical program that will extend for five years or more and cost upward of $20 million. The purpose of this program is to determine the causes of environmental clutter in the navy's long-range active sonar systems. Clutter is the primary problem in active sonar operations in continental shelf environments. Two major offshore field experiments were conducted in 2001 and 2003. The dominant cause of the clutter, as recently found in the 2003 experiment, is from highly concentrated fish schools. The program has essentially developed a new technology for rapidly imaging and making movies of large underwater fish schools over tens of kilometers in near-real time. This technology may become important in monitoring fish abundance, behavior, and response to environmental conditions in the US continental shelf environments that are rapidly being depleted of fish stock. 2ff7e9595c