Astronauts dive into the Final Frontier

Astronauts don’t usually have to contend with marine life (or any other kind of life, for that matter – except for other astronauts, of course) in the middle of a spacewalk, but a NASA team learned how to deal with such distractions during recent undersea mission that simulated asteroid exploration.

The crew of NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 19 (NEEMO 19) lived in the Aquarius lab, which is located 62 feet (19 meters) beneath the waves off the coast of Key Largo, Florida and is where ocean explorer Fabien Cousteau recently completed Mission 31. The astronauts’ week-long mission concluded on Sunday 14th September.

NEEMO 19 commander Randy Bresnik, a veteran of the STS-129 space shuttle mission in 2009, observed that a fish swimming by is actually not all that different from the distractions that may present themselves during a real spacewalk (also known as an extravehicular activity, or EVA).

“It catches the eye. You certainly admire the beauty of it, but you don’t want to get too distracted,” Bresnik said from the Aquarius lab. “It isn’t too different than regular EVAs, where you have the world going by at six miles a second in the field of view.”

As with predecessor mission NEEMO 18, which ran in July, the astronauts tested out techniques that could be used to manage communications delays on an asteroid mission. There would be a 10-minute delay if you were exploring a space rock about halfway between the Earth and Mars, Bresnik said.

NASA is trying out a procedure in which astronauts would complete a circuit of the sites they need to visit on the asteroid while sending the information back to Earth. By the time they return to the first site, communications would have had a chance to travel to and from mission control, letting the astronauts act on any instructions from the ground.

Many aspects of life inside Aquarius are similar to being aboard the space shuttle or the International Space Station, Bresnik said. For instance, space is limited — the living area of Aquarius is about the same as the inside of a school bus — and the days are long with much to be done.

Bringing the astronauts into an isolated environment has advantages over a lab-based simulation because there are certain challenges you can’t replicate using computers, Bresnik added.

“It’s a unique environment, a distracting environment, a dangerous environment that really helps make the simulation and adds stress and challenge to it,” he said.

The success of the NEEMO 19 mission, he added, is due not only to the crew, but also to the extensive network of supporters such as safety divers, the managers of the Aquarius reef base and Florida International University, which oversees the Aquarius site.

Other members of the NEEMO 19 crew included astronauts Jeremy Hansen (Canadian Space Agency), Andreas Mogensen (European Space Agency) and Herve Stevenin, ESA’s head of extravehicular activity at the European Astronaut Centre in Germany.

Source: news.yahoo.com