May 16, 2021. Why shallow waters? For the first few days of the 2021 Technology Demonstration we've stayed in shallow waters during daytime operations so that engineers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory can check the systems on autonomous underwater vehicle Orpheus and correct any issues before heading out to deeper waters. This includes a heading, altitude, speed, and thruster activity check, seeing how much battery these operations take, and having the vehicle move along a scripted route. It is only once the vehicle returns to the surface that the engineers can access its data to see how it performed.