Aquanauts test spacesuits on ocean floor

Goal of six-day mission is testing suit weight distribution

	A NEEMO 10 crewmember climbs a ladder during a session of extravehicular activity for the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations project. The crewmember is wearing a reconfigurable center of gravity backpack to simulate moonwalking.
Space.com / NASA/NOAA/UNCW

By Tariq Malik

Staff Writer

updated 6:48 p.m. ET July 28, 2006

Six aquanauts were rising from the deep Friday 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 10, or NEEMO 10, crew was set to resurface just off Key Largo in the Florida Keys by noon, 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.”

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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 Web site — 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, 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 National Undersea Research Center. The metal habitat contains about the same living area as NASA’s Destiny laboratory berthed at the International Space Station.

CONTINUED : Finding your center (of gravity)

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