Cancord Ropes has a long history of building custom ropes for specific applications. In our 145th year of manufacturing rope in Canada, we have reflected upon many of these projects, and recently came upon a letter from Stone Aerospace thanking us for one of our engineered solutions. The cord used in this project had to meet a unique set of challenges:
- Precision strength-to-weight ratios
- Minimize diameter
- Correct elongation under load
- Compatibility with cryogenic and wet environments
- Exceptional durability under mechanical stress
- High visibility
Drawing on decades of experience, our team at Cancord worked closely with Stone Aerospace to design and manufacture a custom high-performance cord tailored specifically for their ARTEMIS project.
ARTEMIS (Autonomous Rovers/airborne-radar Transects of the Environment beneath the McMurdo Ice Shelf) is a hover-capable AUV, a hybrid autonomous underwater robotic vehicle with a 20km range. For this mission, ARTEMIS was deployed to explore and characterize the environment beneath the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica as an analog to searching for life in ice-covered oceans elsewhere in our solar system. ARTEMIS was deployed through a 52” drill hole in sea ice. The cord we developed was a tailored solution engineered to act as a safety tether to ensure recovery of ARTEMIS if needed.
Our product delivered outstanding performance in the field. In the words of team leader, Dr. Bill Stone, “It was your special 1,100m length of 4mm cord that allowed ARTEMIS to be safely tested under the ice before releasing it on its final long-range mission. And there were a number of times when it saved our bacon! ARTEMIS has over 300,000 lines of onboard research code that operate the vehicle and we were always finding bugs no one thought were there but revealed themselves when in the actual environment. But that’s why NASA send us to these places – to see what breaks and come up with solutions. Your high strength utility cord allowed us to do that and not lose a $10M NASA asset!”
Cancord Ropes has developed numerous tether cords for complex applications and environments over the years. Our ability to do so is what sets us apart from other manufacturers.
