The heave compensator, with a 400-ton working load, compensates for the ship's vertical movement. An iron roughneck is a device that spins joints of drill pipe together. The ship sails with a crew of 65, which includes rig floor personnel, the catering crew and merchant seamen. The rig floor personnel work around the clock recovering rocks and sediments from the seafloor. After whole-core analysis, the cores are split lengthwise.
Scientists take samples from the working half for both shipboard and shore-based analysis.
The shipboard curatorial representative inventories all samples and enters the information in a computer. No samples are taken from the archive half. The Multi-Sensor Track System measures the cores' density, porosity and velocity. It also measures the cores' susceptibility to acquire a magnetic field. The 9.5 meter cores are brought here from the rig floor to be sectioned into 1.5 meter lengths.