US Navy Names Oceanographic Survey Ship In Honour Of Dr. Robert Ballard

The future USNS Robert Ballard will honour Dr Robert Ballard, an ex-U.S. Navy Commander and the former director of the Center for Ocean Exploration. A professor with the Department of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, he’s known widely as a discoverer of the final resting place of the R.M.S. Titanic.

The name selection follows the convention of naming survey vessels after names of explorers, famous marine surveyors, and oceanographers. Ballard was born in 1942 and grew up in San Diego, Calif. On graduating from the University of California in 1965, he earned an Army Reserve Commission, requesting and transferring to the U.S. Navy when called to active service back in 1967.

Assigned at the Office of Naval Research as a liaison officer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution based in Massachusetts, Ballard extensively worked with the deep-submergence vehicle dubbed Alvin (DSV-2). On transitioning to the Naval Reserve in 1970, he did his Ph.D. in geophysics and marine geology at the University of Rhode Island.

He continued working at Woods Hole, where he belonged to a team that discovered deep-sea thermal vents close to the Galapagos Rift. Famous for his discovery in 1985 of the R.M.S. Titanic at a depth of about 12,000 feet, Ballard also headed many shipwreck discoveries, including that of the U.S.S. Quincy (CA-39), U.S.S. Yorktown (CV-5), and President John F Kennedy’s PT-109.

Ballard reportedly took retirement from the US Naval Service back in 1995. In 1989, he launched the distance learning program dubbed the JASON Project, which had reached 12 million school children, and the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn. He is also the president and the founder of the Ocean Exploration Trust. The keel of USNS Ballard was laid in 2022 (October) and is also estimated to be successfully delivered in 2026 to the fleet.

Reference: Naval Today

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