Mission Day 9: The Days are Swimming By!
This morning as we awoke, we knew that today would be a bittersweet day. It would be our last full day in the habitat. The wet porch is now clear of all our diving equipment and wet suits. Drs. Tim and Joe drew our blood this morning for the next of our physiologic and metabolic studies. We’ll do more studies and “debrief” (detailed discussion of the mission) with our mission support team when we return to land. The frantic pace of the timeline has now shifted to ensuring we have every piece and part of our equipment accounted for and organized for shipping to the surface. We packed all of our gear. The potting divers have appeared in more numbers, loading all of our equipment into the large pressurized cans, ensuring the delicate electronics are protected and that most of the air is out of our packing bags as they will otherwise greatly expand when they reach the surface.
A highlight of our mission today was a “ship to ship” call from the Aquarius Habitat up to the International Space Station! The ISS had just passed over the Florida Keys, and with the great help of our Public Affairs Office and Mission Control back at the Johnson Space Center, we were able to talk directly with the ISS crew. Suni Williams, a former Aquarius crew member herself, has been living on the ISS for the past six months. We had a great conversation with her, sharing her memories of living here and on the similarities on living there on the ISS. Suni was very happy to see our large picture of her dog “Gorby” on the wall near the viewport. What an experience to link up good friends and fellow explorers, three above the Earth and six in the ocean!
Mark Hulspeck, our mission’s lead NURC dive trainer, has now joined us for the preparation for the decompression phase of our mission. He also brought down some awesome lasagna prepared by his wife Sue, which we promptly had for dinner! Dr. Peacock, from the U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit also visited the habitat for a quick medical checkup and to brief us to watch for any signs of oxygen toxicity. Mark and James prepared all the valves and gas supplies for the decompression.
Our habitat has now become a very large dive chamber for our 17-hour decompression. We’ve closed the heavy entry lock door and begun to slowly vent our air to the water outside. Lying in our bunks and under our blankets to stay warm, we breathed pure oxygen for three 20-minute periods to begin to purge the nitrogen from our bodies. Our ears continue to “pop” as if we were in airplanes, as the inside pressure has now reached us halfway to the surface pressure, even though we have not physically moved from the depth. If we were to move too rapidly to the surface, all that nitrogen would rapidly come out of our bodies’ tissues, bubble up in our blood streams, collect in our joints and cause significant pain. By moving slowly to the surface, our bodies will be able to purge that nitrogen by breathing it out through our lungs and equalizing with the atmosphere in the habitat, which also slowly rises to surface pressure. It is really important to slow our ascent even more as we reach the surface, as the magnitude of the pressure difference increases there, and so the risk of decompression sickness.
We had one last official duty and that was to take our crew photo. Then the rest of the afternoon was spent watching a movie and just spending time looking out our beautiful viewports to get one last look at the wonderful environment that we have been living in for the last 11 days.
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