He then shifted his attention downward, realizing that his gondola might also take humans into the depths of the sea. The Trieste was the creation of Auguste Piccard, a Swiss physicist who invented a pressurized aluminum gondola that set a balloon altitude record of 51,775 feet in 1931. Only two unmanned attempts have successfully replicated the feat: a Japanese robotic probe called Kaiko in 1995 and a remotely operated American vehicle named Nereus last year. Walsh and Piccard remain the only humans to have delved so deeply into the Mariana Trench, an undersea subduction zone where tectonic plates collide and plunge back into Earth’s molten mantle.
There is one notable difference: A dozen astronauts, all from the Apollo program, walked on the moon. He helped develop the first detailed maps of the global seafloor in the 1990s. “It was like putting a man on the moon,” said David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, part of the University of California San Diego. 23, Walsh and other participants in the historic dive of the Trieste bathyscaph will gather at the Town and Country Resort in Mission Valley to commemorate their achievement. San Diego should be as proud of this as of building (Charles) Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. “Step by step, they pushed back the frontier and helped open up a new world. “These guys were pioneers in the truest sense,” said Kevin Hardy, vice president at Deep sea Power & Light, a submersible-technology company in Kearny Mesa.
This spot, 35,797 feet below the surface, is the deepest surveyed point of Earth’s oceans. 23, 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard became the first people to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
There was no air, and the atmospheric pressures were crushing - up to 8 tons per square inch, strong enough to bend steel. Online: For photos of the Trieste and other deep-sea vehicles, go to /trieste50įifty years ago, two men in an odd-looking vessel out of San Diego ventured to a place no human had gone before - a site as remote and dangerous as a lunar landscape.
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