Mission Day 6: Thursday, July 27th, 2006
The crew awakened slowly for their last day underwater. We pulled out the timeline and joked about reposting Mission Day 1 and starting all over again. Since the aquanauts have to be back in the habitat at least six hours before decompression, no diving was scheduled for the day. Instead, the team stayed busy packing up and conducting an exterior survey of the habitat with the remotely-operated vehicle (ROV)
Koichi worked late the night before reconfiguring the ROV from its ground rolling/sampling/collecting mode to a more streamlined flying mode (he removed the wheels, saddlebag and camera post). Each of the team members took a turn flying around the habitat. The ROV has a very useful “automatic hover” mode that made the operation easier; no one became tangled in umbilicals or got too close to the habitat. At the end of the time, the ROV watched the surface support divers try new techniques to pick up the weights and underwater equipment that remained at the worksite.
A ”tag-up” with the International Space Station astronauts was the highlight of the day. The team spoke with Jeff Williams, Pavel Vinogradov and Thomas Reiter as they orbited over Central America. Jeff had been a member of NEEMO 3 and had been scuba-trained by Mark Hulsbeck, so the crew had a number of NEEMO stories to share. Jeff reemphasized how similar the NEEMO mission was to his space experience, especially in matters of timeline, procedures and just getting along with folks in a confined space. The discussion will be broadcast on NASA TV and will be available on the NASA website.
After a quick visit and brief from the doc, our decompression hab tech Roger Garcia came down and got us all ready for our first hour of decompression on oxygen. The procedure entails everyone staying in their bunks breathing oxygen from a mask for three 20-minute periods. After five days in the wet suit helmets, the oxygen masks weren’t too bad, although there is a bit of resistance on the exhale. Dominic set up the “Pirates of the Caribbean” video to keep us entertained, so the hour went by very quickly.
Afterward, we had our first quiet evening and were able to catch up on journals, photos, and e-mail, plan tomorrow’s splash-up party, come up with new mixtures of dehydrated food for dinner and share sea stories. The best sea stories are those we made this week though, and we can’t wait to get out and tell them!
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