We know more about outer space than we do our oceans. Less than one percent of the ocean’s floors have been explored, and it’s this very environment that NASA will be using to condition astronauts for future deep space missions. Set to begin on June 18, NASA will deploy a crew to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean as part of a project known as NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 22. The expedition will span over 10 days, and focus on both exploration spacewalks and objectives pertaining to deep space missions launched by the International Space Station (ISS).
“The close parallels of inner and outer space exploration will be clearly demonstrated during this undersea mission,” says NEEMO Project Lead Bill Todd. “The daily seafloor traverses, or extravehicular activities in space jargon, are jam packed with technology and operations concept testing, as well as complex marine science. In the interior of Aquarius, aquanauts and astronauts will tackle an array of experiments and human research related to long duration space travel.”
The NEEMO 22 expedition will take place 6.2 miles off the Florida coast at Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base undersea research habitat, where the NEEMO crew and two professional habitat technicians will also reside during the 10 days. In addition to preparing for future deep space missions, the crew will also evaluate hardware sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), designed to assist crew members in evacuating someone who suffered an injury during a lunar spacewalk.
The crew’s primary objectives involve testing spaceflight countermeasure equipment, technology for precisely tracking equipment in a habitat, along with studies of sleep and body composition. In addition to conditioning astronauts for future deep space missions, marine research will also be performed by Florida International University’s marine science department.
The NEEMO 22 mission will be commanded by Kjel Lindgren, a NASA astronaut who was involved in space station expeditions 44 and 45 in 2015, spent 141 days in space, and conducted two spacewalks on his first spaceflight. Lindgren will be aboard the Aquarius laboratory over 60 feet below the ocean surface. ESA astronaut Pedro Duque will also accompany Lindgren, along with Jacobs Engineering employee Trevor Graff, and Dom D’Agostino, a researcher from the University of South Florida and Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)