Undersea ‘aquanauts’ practice for moon trips

By Tariq Malik

updated 2:46 p.m. ET April 19, 2006

A team of astronauts and divers is wrapping up a record-setting mission to the ocean floor — filled with undersea “moonwalks” and robotic surgeries controlled by a doctor high and dry in Canada.

The six aquanauts of the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 9 mission, or NEEMO 9, are set to return to the Earth’s surface Thursday after 18 days of underwater living aboard Aquarius, an undersea laboratory stationed 67 feet (20 meters) beneath the ocean surface, just off Key Largo in the Florida Keys.

“Every single thing that we’re doing on this mission directly relates to exploration,” NASA astronaut and NEEMO 9 aquanaut Ron Garan told Space.com during a phone call to Aquarius. “One of the big things we’re trying to look at is to see how we can have collaborative effort between the human astronauts and robotic explorers.”

NEEMO 9 is the longest NASA ocean floor mission and the longest to date aboard Aquarius. Since diving down to the undersea outpost on April 3, Garan has been working aboard the aquatic laboratory with fellow NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, NEEMO 9 commander Dave Williams of the Canadian Space Agency, and University of Cincinnati physician Tim Broderick. Professional Aquarius divers Jim Buckley and Ross Hein are also aboard the laboratory.

“Except for the launch, we’re basically on a space mission,” Garan said, adding that the mission is supporting NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. “We’re in an extremely hazardous environment … it’s a small confined space, with the crew on a very tight timeline.”

Aquarius is operated by the National Undersea Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA owns the ocean-floor laboratory, which has as much living area as NASA’s Destiny lab module aboard the international space station.

Long-distance surgery
One of the key goals for the NEEMO 9 crew included the assembly and operation of a surgical robot designed to allow physicians to dress wounds remotely with only an Internet linkup between them.

Canadian doctor Mehran Anvari, a veteran of telemedicine experiments with past NEEMO crews, directed the robot to suture a gash inside Aquarius. But instead of working aboard Aquarius, or even aboard a surface ship, Anvari sat at a workstation in the Canadian city of Hamilton, Ontario, where he directs the Center for Minimal Access Surgery at McMaster University.

“It was fantastic,” Anvari said of the robot’s performance, adding that he also mentored the NEEMO 9 crew in medical procedures. “Last [mission], we had very simple robotics and our traditional surgical robots could not fit inside the habitat.”

NASA/JSC A robot aboard the Aquarius undersea laboratory on the ocean floor stitches together a simulated wound. A Canadian doctor sitting at a control interface 1,300 miles away directed the robot.

But for NEEMO 9, the aquanauts constructed a small, portable robot equipped with cameras and dexterous pincers to manipulate rock samples and suture needles.

A two-second time delay — similar to that experienced in Earth-moon communications during NASA’s Apollo missions — was also built into the system to simulate a lunar manned mission.

“This also has connotations for people on Earth,” Anvari said of the telerobotic surgery. “A two-second time delay is something that you’d experience if you have more than one satellite hop for your communications to a remote area on Earth.”

Anvari also used the robot surgeon to transfer ocean floor rock samples collected by Scuttle — a wheeled rover designed to test lunar robotic exploration techniques — into a storage compartment.

Mary Sue Bell, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, watched over the procedure, which she said reduces the risk of contamination from human handlers.

“Even [astronaut] gloves can present a contamination risk,” Bell said.

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