Six
aquanauts will rise from the deep today after nearly a week stationed on the
ocean floor testing spacesuit
concepts for future Moon and Mars missions.
A joint team
of astronauts and divers, the NASA Extreme Environment Mission
Operations (NEEMO) 10 crew is set to resurface just off Key Largo in the
Florida Keys by 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT), leaving their undersea Aquarius
habitat 67 feet (20 meters) beneath the ocean waves.
"It takes
17 hours for us to surface safely," shuttle flight veteran Koichi Wakata, NEEMO 10 commander and a
Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut, told SPACE.com
in a sea-to-surface phone call. "In a sense, it is a very extreme environment."
The primary
goal of NEEMO 10's six-day mission aimed at testing changes in spacesuit weight
distribution that could affect an astronaut's performance during excursions on
the Moon or Mars.
"This is
outstanding," Wakata said during one "moonwalk" dive,
while his helmet-mounted video camera - webcast live
via the Aquarius website - relayed images of the undersea laboratory and its
surrounding sea life.
Wakata
and NASA astronauts Andrew Feustel and Karen
Nyberg dived down to Aquarius on July 22 with professional divers Mark Hulsbeck and Dominic Landucci. They
were joined by Karen Kohanowich, deputy director of
the Undersea Research Program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), which owns Aquarius.
"The one
thing that's so wonderful about Aquarius is that it's good for so many
different things," Kohanowich told reporters during a
teleconference this week. "[As] a NASA analogue, marine science and education,
it's a very important aspect of what we do."
Aquarius is
operated for NOAA by the University of
North Carolina at Wilmington's
(UNCW) National Undersea Research
Center. The metal habitat
contains about the same living area as NASA's Destiny
laboratory berthed at the International Space
Station (ISS).
Finding
your center (of gravity)
NEEMO 10
aquanauts staged daily dives while wearing an adjustable rig that allowed them to
simulate walking on the Moon
(one-sixth Earth's gravity) or Mars
(one-third Earth normal), as well as physically change the center of gravity on
their mock spacesuits.
"Anybody
that's backpacked knows that if you haven't packed your backpack just right,
you end up top-heavy or feel like you're going to fall over," said Nyberg, who
served as a spacesuit environmental control systems engineer for NASA before
joining the Astronaut Corps in July 2000, in a telephone interview. "So the
center of gravity is really important for how we pack the portable life support
system, and how that weight is distributed on the suit itself."
Aquanauts
went through the motions of walking, retrieving cargo from a simulated resupply container - an essential task for long-duration
Moon or Mars missions - and fell over, then got back up, to evaluate how slight
changes in a spacesuit's center of gravity alter an astronaut's mobility.
"We were so
surprised how, depending on the location of the center of gravity, it really
affects the efficiency and effectiveness of the spacewalk," Wakata
said, adding that Aquarius moonwalks were a substantial change from the training
runs he conducted in NASA's immense spacewalk training pool near Johnson Space
Center (JSC). "It was a very strange feeling to be able to walk for a
spacewalk, because [NASA's] spacewalks now are for zero gravity."
Feustel
said the NEEMO 10 crew also conducted a series of communications and mapping
demonstrations for moonwalk navigation. The aquanauts also worked with mission
controllers at NASA's Exploration Planning and
Operations Control (ExPOC) center at JSC to handoff
control of a small ocean rover.
"What makes
it special is that the decisions we make going out the door are life critical
decisions, just like [those] you'd make in space," Feustel
said.
Undersea
living
While the
NEEMO 10 crew's mission is ending, NASA plans at least one more expedition to
Aquarius this year.
The agency's
yet-to-be-announced NEEMO 11 crew is slated to begin training on Sept. 12 and
dive down to Aquarius on Sept. 16 for a six-day mission, according to the
undersea lab's schedule.
Despite
their hectic daily timelines, some NEEMO aquanauts managed to take time out to ponder
the sea life around their aquatic home.
"I did a
dusk dive the other night and I saw a spotted moray eel I've never seen before,
and I love moray eels," Nyberg said.
"So I was pretty excited."
New fish aside,
Aquarius is also home so some neighborly creatures that have earned a place in
the hearts of NEEMO crews.
"This
habitat has become home to so many fish, and there are a few that we've
recognized," Nyberg said.
"There's a huge grouper and a big barracuda named Bob."
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