Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) and its global partners have designed two major engineering advancements to support the eventual creation of the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) telescope; starting with planned deployment of the first one-kilometre mooring off the coast of British Columbia during an expedition later this year.
The multi-partner P-ONE project aims to eventually deploy approximately 70 one-kilometer-tall moorings, spaced 80 metres apart, and equipped with scientific instruments extending up from the seafloor. P-ONE will be plugged into ONC’s NEPTUNE observatory, using the pre-existing subsea network to transform vast stretches of deep ocean into a massive particle detector.
“ONC plays a critical role in P-ONE,” says A.J. Baron, a senior mechanical engineer and field manager at ONC. “We are responsible for ensuring that the instrumentation and the scientists have what they need for power, for communications, and for extremely precise timing.”
ONC engineers, with support from P-ONE collaborators from Canada, Europe, United Kingdom and the United States, designed and manufactured a custom deployment frame and a project-specific string junction box (sJB) to make it easier to precisely place and power the one-kilometer-tall moorings at a depth of over 2,600 meters on the seafloor. There they will provide continuous monitoring to detect the abundant, but elusive neutrinos that pass through Earth.
Research has shown that the pitch black of the deep ocean is a perfect environment to study neutrinos. These elementary particles can only be observed by a faint flash of light they emit when colliding with other sub-atomic particles. Produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, radioactive decay, exploding stars and other exotic astrophysical phenomena, scientists believe these particles are cosmic messengers that can help us better understand the history of the universe.
Engineering innovation at more than 2,600 meters below sea level
The extreme conditions of working in the deep sea, however, present significant challenges that require specialized oceanographic instrumentation—a domain where ONC’s expertise is pivotal.
“Because the equipment is in a high-pressure deep-sea environment, the junction box components and materials needed to be designed to last a long time and withstand the harsh ocean environment and corrosion,” says Baron. “We also needed a deployment frame robust enough to be lowered to the seafloor, and an unfurling method that would release the entire string safely remotely without damaging the equipment."
The deployment frame was developed to enable the controlled unspooling of the armoured cable and scientific instruments in the shape of a figure-eight to avoid the mooring tangling due to the often rough and stormy conditions of the Northeast Pacific.
Unlike traditional surface-based deployment methods used in oceanographic moorings, which require nearly perfect weather windows to avoid the tangling, ONC’s innovative bottom-up approach is designed to allow the entire structure to be lowered as a single compact unit and directly deployed to the seafloor using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).
A.J. Baron, a senior mechanical engineer and field manager at ONC and Miranda Herle, EIT, a junior project engineer at ONC. Credit: TRIUMF
At the base of each mooring, the junction box serves as the system's nerve centre for power, control and data management. Built to handle 26 simultaneous instrument connections, it integrates the hyper-precise timing equipment critical to detecting passing neutrinos.
“The string junction box is the largest integrated electronics assembly we've ever created here at ONC,” says Degnan Hembroff, senior project engineer at ONC. “It required us developing a new housing to survive the deep water and the pressures involved there, and we're aiming for an extremely long lifetime, measured in 15 to 20 years.”
ONC and P-ONE scientists with the support of TRIUMF, successfully completed a shallow-water test of the deployment frame and junction box off Granville Island on June 23, 2026, clearing a major check point to move forward with deploying the first of the P-ONE mooring.
“The deployment is going to require very careful coordination between two offshore vessels working in tight quarters together,” says Hembroff. “We need a heavy-lift vessel to lower the infrastructure to the seafloor and a vessel with a specialized ROV for the detailed subsea work, including plugging in to the network and managing the release of the P-ONE string.”
International Collaboration
The P-ONE project brings together a multi-disciplinary team from institutes across Canada, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
“Our P-ONE collaboration is grateful for the support received from Ocean Networks Canada since 2018,” said Elisa Resconi, an astrophysicist at the Technical University of Munich and longtime proponent of the P-ONE project.
“The junction boxes and the deployment frame are complex engineering advancements that represent a major contribution to the project’s infrastructure preparation and eventual deployment. From that point we’ll be able to start using the ocean as a gigantic neutrino telescope and understand just a little bit more of our universe.” - Elisa Resconi, astrophysicist at the Technical University of Munich
The P-ONE observatory will be connected to ONC’s NEPTUNE observatory at Cascadia Basin by a custom built approximately 30 km subsea extension cable that places its location outside of the Tang.ɢ̱wan – ḥačxwiqak – Tsig̱is Marine Protected Area, in compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements for MPAs.
The resulting cross-disciplinary data collected will be shared globally with P-ONE partners, while the core oceanographic and marine life data will be openly accessible to the public via ONC’s Oceans 3.0 data management system.
“This international collaboration is exactly what frontier science is all about. The project has required scientists from many fields, engineers and industry to all work together and bring their expertise to the table to get us to this point,” says Dr. Kate Moran, UVic professor, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, and former ONC president and CEO. “What makes this project truly remarkable is the multi-use design of our subsea infrastructure. By pairing cosmic particle detectors with advanced oceanographic sensors, this single piece of deep-sea engineering will be able to explore the mysteries of the universe while tracking critical ocean data about the deep sea and the marine life that live in the deep-sea.”
P-ONE, once complete, would be the first neutrino observatory in the Pacific Ocean.
The P-ONE project is funded, in part, by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
A media kit containing photos and video is available in this folder.
P-ONE Partners
The P-ONE project is supported by national and international partnerships that include: Ocean Networks Canada, University of Victoria, University of Alberta (UoA), Simon Fraser University (SFU), Queen's University, TRIUMF, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP PAS) Kraków, European Southern Observatory, Institut für Kernphysik, Goethe Universität, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt, Max Planck Institute for Physics, University College London, Michigan State University (MSU), Georgia Institute of Technology and Drexel University.
