Jacques Piccard,86, one of two pilots in the deepest ever submarine dive, has died at his Swiss home.
In 1960 Piccard and co-pilot Don Walsh took a bathysphere seven miles to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. In it's way, it was a far more complex operation than getting astronauts to the moon (nine years later). They found life at that depth and it led to the ban on dumping nuclear waste in ocean trenches and, not often remembered, helped accelerate the Green movement. It was recognised the oceans and the deep trenches were inner space and as difficult as outer space to explore.
Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in the bathyshpere Trieste which was designed to withstand the pressure of 108.6 MPa - one thousand times the pressure at the surface -and built by Jacques' father
After the dive Jacques, a Belgian, worked for the space agency Nasa.