Aquanauts test spacesuits on ocean floor

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.

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