Undersea ‘aquanauts’ practice for moon trips

Undersea moonwalks
NEEMO 9 aquanauts did not leave all of the work in robot hands during their mission.

The crew also toiled alongside Scuttle to assemble underwater structures while wearing a special backpack to simulate the gravitational tug of the moon.

“We’ve weighed them out to the same gravity they’d experience on the moon, one-sixth Earth’s gravity,” Garan said of the aquanaut moonwalkers. “They assembled what is essentially a communications relay station.”

The 20-foot (6-meter) structure is similar to one future astronauts may have to build on the moon in order to stay in contact with a lunar base camp on extended moonwalks, the aquanauts said.

“The lunar horizon is only about 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers), and if they go beyond that we’re going to need to communicate,” Garan added. “This structure would allow us to extend our communications range out to 5.9 miles (9.5 kilometers).”

UNCW/NOAA/NASA The Scuttle rover rolls along the ocean floor to collect samples and return them to the Aquarius undersea laboratory during NEEMO 9.

Garan said the lessons learned from NEEMO 9 and future Aquarius expeditions will be pooled alongside NASA’s Apollo experiences in a comprehensive database to support the U.S. space agency’s human space exploration efforts.

NASA has used the Aquarius laboratory as a training ground for space station crew members, including astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who served aboard NEEMO 3 in 2002 and called the underwater outpost last week from the international space station, where he serves as Expedition 13 flight engineer.

“One thing that we don’t have here that you guys have down there are all those little critters outside,” Williams told the NEEMO 9 crew from orbit, adding that his first few days aboard the space station were exhausting. “I remember on Aquarius, just sleeping very well. That was some of the best sleep I’ve ever had.”

A growing laboratory
Much of the support for the NEEMO 9 crew — which includes wireless communications from the ocean floor, as well as high-speed connections for video, data and Internet access — has been due to a five-year effort to turn Aquarius from a coral reef camp into a robust undersea laboratory.

“In the course of these missions we’ve increased the bandwidth by 10 times for our real-time data communications from the sea floor,” Andy Shepard, NOAA’s Undersea Research Center director for Aquarius, told Space.com. “It was the big leap forward that we needed to really make the lab what we needed.”

About $500,000 in NASA support over the last five years has allowed Aquarius — the last of NOAA’s saturation diving platforms — to reach its current state. The agency is now working with NASA and the U.S. Navy to develop a mobile saturation diving platform that could aid in submarine rescues and marine studies.

“We’re now looking for a suitable chamber that would be cost-effective,” Shepard said, adding that the chamber would initially be used as an Aquarius extension. “We’d start off by doubling the living area of Aquarius. It’s one of the more comfortable habitats … but we can use some more space.”

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