AURORA, the university’s new multi-purpose research vessel offers totally new possibilities to the marine research at the university, in Denmark and Department of Geoscience.

Per Trinhammer from Geoscience is part of the shipping group established back in 2010, and as such he is following the process all the way from the very first drawings to the final stages . He will also be part of the project group which will be responsible for the overall operation and priorities.

The ship was built at a ship and boat yard in Hvide Sande on the Danish west coast.

In the design of the ship was taken into account that it shall support Department of Geoscience with, in particular, the marine seismic equipment, but also the sampling equipment to be used in near-surface sediments. The ship is permanently equipped with multibeam sonar and sub-bottom sonar . These two instruments map the sea bed surface (bathymetry ) and the first 20 metres of the sea bed, respectively, with a solution of layer boundaries of approx. 20 cm. With a combination of this new and our existing equipment, the ship can be equipped with Boomer/Kicking and airgun multichannel reflection seismics, which will allow us to map sediment depths of 200 and 1500 m, respectively, and layer boundaries  of 50cm to 5m, respectively.

On 25 April 2014 AURORA was officially named and taken into use. From the very start many bookings have been made for different research jobs.