Zeus II (T-ARC-7)
1984–
The second U.S. Navy ship named Zeus, for the Greek counterpart of the Roman god, Jupiter.
II
(T-ARC-7: displacement 15,700; length 513'; beam 73'; draft 26'; speed 14 knots; complement 53; armament none; class Zeus)
The second Zeus (T-ARC-7) was laid down on 1 June 1981 at San Diego, Calif., by National Steel & Shipbuilding Co.; launched on 30 October 1982; sponsored by Mrs. Ursula Meese, wife of Edwin Meese III, Counselor to the President of the United States; and was placed in service with the Military Sealift Command (MSC) on 19 March 1984.
The ship’s main mission is the installation and maintenance of submarine cable systems. Zeus combines her main propulsion system with bow- and stern-mounted tunnel thrusters in an integrated control system that provides the precise track-keeping and position-holding capabilities required for cable laying and repair, array-laying operations, projector towing, and other mission tasks. Fitted with a wide array of cable handling equipment including five cable tanks, cable transporters, cable tension machines, self-fleeting cable drums, overboarding sheaves, and a dynamometer cable fairleader, Zeus can lay up to 1,000 miles of cable in depths of up to 9,000 feet without resupply. She is also equipped with both single-beam and multi-beam (SIMRAD EM 121) sonars for bottom profiling, and can deploy towed sidescan sonars and camera sleds. Current, temperature and density systems, deployed acoustic measurement buoys, and environmental measurement buoys also provide data measurement of the ocean. Zeus is the only active cable laying/repair ship in the U.S. Navy, and often operates out of Cheatham Annex, a part of Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, Va.
Detailed history pending.
Mark L. Evans
20 January 2016
