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by Woods Hole, the AUVs look like 13-foot yellow torpedoes. Woods Hole calls them REMUS vehicles, short for Remote EnvironmentalMonitoring Units. They were rechristened
Ginger
and
Mary Ann
for the Hollywood starlet and farm girl characters of the 1960s television sitcom
Gilligan’s Island
.
    The two REMUS vehicles were designed to follow programmed instructions instead of needing humans to monitor and drive them like cars.
Mary Ann
splashed in first to mow the lawn east-west over the site.
Ginger
followed, moving north-south. To make their initial map, they emitted side-scan sonar signals that bounced off objects 600 meters distant or more. Their sound waves moved much more efficiently than light through the water, making them ideal for subsurface mapping. Echoes translated into shapes. When finished, they surfaced. The crew fished them out of the water to download and analyze their data. The AUVs then got new missions.
    Scientists joked the two had different personalities. “
Ginger
is much higher maintenance,” Woods Hole’s Brennan Phillips told a video crew on the expedition.
    The expedition also photographed the site using a remotely operated optical scanner, a Phoenix Remora 6000. It came standard with a small, two-dimensional utility camera. To do a full optical survey of
Titanic
, the Remora had to be retrofitted with high-definition, two- and three-dimensional cameras.
    The yellow-topped Remora, which looks like a big cube of just over a meter per side, took two hours to complete a thruster-powered descent to the ocean floor. Once there, its camera system shot digital still images at 30 to 60 frames per second; still and motion three-dimensional images, and on-demand single images at resolutions incomprehensible a few years earlier. All fed their data into a central bank, which recorded multiple images simultaneously and time-stamped them for matching with navigation data. The technology brought 3-D images of handrails, portholes, and a boat crane into clear focus, seemingly close enough to touch.
    Key to capturing clear images was bright light. An artificial sunrose on
Titanic
when the Remora’s illumination, supplied by Deep Sea Power & Light, bathed it in the equivalent of 120,000 lumens.
    Aside from a delay caused by hurricane warnings, the mapping project worked well.
Mary Ann, Ginger
, and the Remora collected more data than human eyes could gather through tiny submersible windows.
    The imaging equipment picked up objects as small as coins. Some images showed things undetected by previous expeditions. Others depicted artifacts that might have been ejected from the hull during descent or impact. Geologic features, such as the curves, hills, and valleys of the seafloor, gave the clearest picture yet of topography.
    The scientists on the 2010 expedition were cautious about hasty judgments, but they were delighted by the quality of what they had seen.
    â€œWe probably know more about this site than any piece of ocean floor, but we still don’t know an awful lot,” said Delgado. “We’re still sorting all of it out.”
    Expedition participants will know even more when they populate their map with oceanographic and other scientific data, they told a federal court in 2011. (The court hearing at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia was to provide an update on RMS Titanic, Inc.’s role as salvor-in-possession of Titanic. RMS Titanic, Inc. also used the opportunity to outline its vision for adopting an expanded role of trustee to increase scientific knowledge and educational awareness of the ship.) They expect to pinpoint every artifact still at the site, and fix the position of every artifact removed by previous expeditions. For example, an asparagus pot retrieved by RMS Titanic, Inc. in 2004 would get its own map coordinates, along with images and historical data available through the click of a mouse.
    When the final map is complete, expedition