So where is the Day 5 journal you ask? Well, some days you just can’t fit in everything that you would like. Such was the 5th day. So busy, I barely had time to breathe. We started out to perform our communications detailed test objective along the pinnacle line. As we were swimming up to the way-station that marks the end of the main pinnacle line, I saw a larger than normal amount of air escaping from the structure. To get an idea of what the way-station looks like, take a bowl and turn it upside down and then place it in the water. Now, place four legs on it and make it large enough for two people to stand next to each other. Inside there is a panel with two steel braided hoses which we connect to an air fill line on our tanks. On this day the filter that the air passes through had come loose and pulled the hose down. This allowed a lot of air to escape from the fitting. This extra amount of air was what I saw escaping from the station.
Well, given the problems with the way-station, I decided the safe thing to do was to discontinue our work at the pinnacle and head on over to the Kamper area and continue our communication checks there. Even though we did not get to finish our work at the pinnacle, I felt the training we received was essential to our mission. We were faced with an unforeseen problem and we had to do what was right with respect to safety. We replanned our mission accordingly, working in conjunction with the mission control (ExPOC) and completed another portion of the tasks that we had been assigned. This is exactly what can happen on a flight and you can’t get any better training.
After we completed our work at Kamper, Wheels (Doug) and I headed off to the end of the northeast line to complete a comm check out at the way-station on that end. Time was getting short and the comm was poor, so we called it quits and headed back to the habitat. On the way back a sea turtle came cruising by, totally at ease with our presence. His flight through the water looked effortless as he made his way across the coral reef. A different medium to fly in, but flying nonetheless.
Our fifth day seemed so compressed with things to do that I felt we were constantly butting up against our schedule. Getting done with a dive, doffing (taking off) your equipment, strip out of your wetsuits, rinse and hang them, take a shower, dry off, slip some clothes on, hustle into the main lock, arrange the table, fix the camera, slip on a crew shirt, sit at the table and smile, because you are going to be on a video-teleconference to an education event hosted by the folks back in Houston. Whew… Sometimes you just can’t find enough time in the day. I felt yesterday we were all going full bore. Hustle, hustle, hustle! I think we could not have done more and I am incredibly proud of the team for rising to the occasion.
Today had a much better pace. Even though we hopped (well, crawled slowly would be a more apt description) out of our bunks at 0500, the day proved to be less stressful. We conducted a dawn dive to see how life around the reef changes with daybreak. Most of the fish that hang around the habitat at night find a place to hide among the coral during the day. There are a lot of lobster in the cracks and crevices. They are actually pretty easy to spot because their antennae stick out of the holes and dance around a bit. The most remarkable part of the dive, and perhaps this entire mission, came when a large sea turtle came gliding past us as we turned the corner on the S4 excursion line. It flew past me and passed Wheels by about 20 feet. It cruised off into the shadows only to reappear headed directly for Wheels. We all floated there mesmerized as it flew right up to Doug’s head, passing about six inches in front of his nose. Wheels reached his hand up to touch the belly and it turned straight for the surface, did an amazing about-face and zipped off into the distance. Nick had his camera at the ready so we hope we captured some pictures for others to enjoy as well.
The afternoon found us performing our first coral science dive which consists of a lot of measuring and photo-taking combined with meticulous notes. That’s Nick’s forte. He’s the excellent record keeper in the group. The one thing that we found doing coral science is that you have a much better opportunity to view the life living on the reef. We are right down in it looking at things looking back. Case in point, a large moray eel poked his head out of a hole about a foot or two from Wheel’s hand just as he put a marker down for a coral specimen. We took some video of the eel as it made its presence known. They have this interesting habit of opening and closing their mouth. While it looks menacing, it is actually just breathing. It’s the teeth that catch your attention, breathing or not. We gave him his space and went on about our work.
This evening was pretty relaxed. We have a DVD player on board so we hauled out the movie “Finding Nemo” for some entertainment. Kind of fun to pick out the fish that look familiar. Coop was calling out the types of fish as they came on the screen. Nice to have an expert on board!
One of the things that my parents like to do at their home in Spicewood, Texas is to sit on the front porch and watch the sun go down. All sorts of animals make their way across the stage of Texas hill country. You can make out the sounds of the whippoorwill, hear the locust in the trees, and catch the sounds of the coyotes across the valley. Tonight, I did something similar, but slightly different. I put on my mask, crawled out on to what we call the wet porch. The sun was down, the water was illuminated by the lights surrounding Aquarius, and I dipped my face beneath the surface of the water. There was not an absence of sound, rather the slow steady hum of some equipment on the habitat. Where my parents would expect the occasional animal to make its presence known, I faced a multitude of sea life, swimming in the light and shadows. Fish in all shapes and sizes, casting flashes of light like a mirrored ball on a dance floor. And it was a dance!! Fish were darting about in an endless cascade of movement. It was as pleasing as any moment I have spent on my parent’s porch. Just a view from a different world, but one where life is just as full and remarkable as the one above.
Greetings!
One of the unique things about our NEEMO missions is the communication system we are using that allows the aquanauts in the water to converse with a ‘mission control’ team (called the Advanced Operations Cadre), located in the Experimental Planning and Operations Center (ExPOC) near the Mission Control Center in Houston. The aquanauts are wearing wireless underwater communication units attached to a special full face mask that allows them to talk to each other, the habitat, and the ExPOC all while performing complex tasks in the water. For all of the EVAs, the ExPOC is monitoring the crew’s location and other vital information by talking directly with the crew.
In order to characterize how these units perform in this environment, we have developed a communications task where the aquanauts swim out to a specific area on the reef and perform a prescribed test protocol. Back in Houston, the ExPOC rates the quality of the communications and records the results. This exercise is analogous to the types of activities a newly arrived crew on the Moon or Mars might perform.
Frankly, this is one area we’ve really struggled with this mission. Some days the quality of the voice is crystal clear between the aquanauts and ExPOC. Other times it resembles a bad Verizon commercial: “Can you hear me now?!” It can be very frustrating to all involved. The crew, ExPOC, and NURC staff are to be commended for their patience and diligence in working these issues day after day. Fortunately, today was one of those great days for comm!
A couple of interesting Engineering experiments were conducted today. The first is an experiment in conjunction with Rice University to measure bone strength. Loss of bone strength is of great interest to NASA because it is a problem seen by our astronauts in space. In the case of astronauts, the lack of gravity, and the fact that the bones are never seeing any weight or force on them, leads them to lose strength. Use it or lose it. Therefore we schedule a couple of hours per day for our astronauts to counteract this problem. The end effect is very similar to osteoporosis, a disease where bones lose their strength, and which afflicts millions. The bones throughout your body are constantly being torn down and rebuilt throughout your life time. This is a natural process that keeps them healthy.
When one has osteoporosis, the teardown keeps happening, but the buildup slows down. The net effect is bone loss. At the cellular level, bones are really a latticework of connections - picture how construction scaffolding looks. You have lengthwise members that provide strength, and cross members that keep them from buckling.
Current methods of looking at bone health (Dexa scans, etc.) do a good job of showing bone density, but it turns out that’s not really a good indicator of bone strength. Where the bone is lost on this scaffold is just as important to overall strength as how much is lost. On NEEMO 6 we will be operationally evaluating a small, portable acoustic vibration device which can give a measure of bone strength. In addition, it is designed to be usable for a normal person with minimal training. It’s likely that this device will be used at home by osteoporosis patients in years to come to monitor the progress of their disease, and also the treatment effects.
The other experiment the crew worked on today was the Wireless Physiological Monitoring system. Tara has been outfitted with sensors for this device for the last 4 days. The objective is to determine the usefulness of a commercial wireless medical monitoring device inside a metal-walled habitat (similar to the other kind NASA uses!) It’s even accompanied her on some of her dives. The system can measure heart rate and overall activity, skin temperature, and core body temperature. Evaluating it in the Aquarius environment will give us valuable data on how this system will perform in a space analog situation.
Even down here, I am tied to my computer. I’m using a small handheld device to capture my daily routine as well as my schedule and e-mail. When I get a chance, I synchronize to the main laptop and download my current information. We rely on the laptop and its connection to the Web to retrieve our schedule and any messages from mission control. That’s exactly how we do it on board the International Space Station. The tools we use down here are more recent versions, but they serve the same purpose. We are getting the chance to put some of the new software through its paces and making comments back to the engineers on its usefulness. My personal digital assistant decided to take a hike this evening and left me high and dry without a computer. After trying to do a soft reboot with no joy, out comes the battery and back in it goes. Presto! Back up and running for the time being. Back to my journal…
Today we finished the water lab project. A mad scramble at the end to get it completed. The parts can go together a thousand different ways, but only one way is right. Rather than walking around the structure, we can swim over the top, through, and around. Sure beats having to stand in one place. Can you imagine working on your house the same way? Building a structure in neutral buoyancy is quite a challenge. When I have the chance to talk to people about the International Space Station, I try and paint a picture of what it is like to work in microgravity and build something as incredible as the International Space Station. What we have done in orbit over the past 16 assembly flights, is proof, without a doubt, that we are capable of building structures in the harshest environment known to humans. And we have done it without ever touching our feet to the ground! Think of how much easier that task will be when we one day do it on the Moon or on Mars.
Nick and Tara spent the afternoon tagging the northeast excursion line. They hustled out about 1,000-feet-worth of tagging before returning to the habitat. Right about the time they came back aboard, we were fortunate to have a televised conversation with the crew aboard the International Space Station. Mike Fincke and Gennady Padalka joined us via a video teleconference for about 15 minutes. What a fantastic opportunity for us, and it was great to hear Mike and Gennady’s voices. Mike commanded the second NEEMO mission, so he is very familiar with the habitat and all of the tasks that we are trying to accomplish down here. We treated them to a video tour of the habitat and some shots out the window at the fish congregating outside. Imagine how it must be to fly over the oceans of the world every 90 minutes and still talk with your friends beneath the sea. Pretty neat stuff that we get to do.
Our work here has been difficult, but worth the effort. The environment is very unforgiving and you have to be careful that you don’t make a mistake. You keep constant track of your air supply and you make sure that you can make it to one of the way-stations at the end of the excursion lines for a refill, if necessary. The difficulty about living down here for so long is that we do not have the option to go to the surface if we run out of air. You would think that would be the safest place. But for a diver who has spent more than a few hours at this depth, their bloodstream becomes saturated with nitrogen. By breathing compressed air at this depth for an extended period of time, you risk getting small nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream if you swim to the surface. Look in a bottle of soda sometime before you open the lid. Notice any bubbles before you pop the top? Once you open the bottle, you equalize the pressure, actually decreasing the pressure inside the liquid, and look at what happens. More bubbles than you know what to do with. Imagine those same bubbles floating around your veins. The right bubble in the right place could block the blood flow to a vital organ. Not something I would want to happen to me. So, if I run out of air (I won’t let that happen) I’ll grab my diving buddy and borrow their air and make my way back to the habitat. That’s the safe place down here. Not the surface. So you may be asking yourself, how can you come back to the surface later, once the mission is complete? Check back in a few days and I will let you know.
Remember the big toothy barracuda? He’s still out there. Craig Cooper, one of our habitat technicians has a name for him: BOB, Big Old Barracuda…
Greetings!
Standing tall and proud on the shifting white sands meters from the Aquarius habitat lies a glistening new visitor to the reef today. At first glance, it may look like a jumbled maze of extruded polyvinyl chloride held together by bolts and wire ties, but this demon of the deep is actually a unique in-water crew task training exercise called Waterlab.
For the fifth mission in a row, NEEMO aquanauts have had the opportunity to assemble this unique and challenging structure. Designed as an EVA type task exercise, Waterlab has proven to be a favorite task of previous NEEMO crews. Given a simple set of schematics, hundreds of feet of pre-cut pieces of PVC and thousands of bolts and nuts, the crew is tasked with coming up with a plan to build the structure in a set of three stages (dives) and to follow all of the safety limitations put upon them. Sound simple? It’s not. Off the sea bottom, it stands almost 24 feet tall, and includes an intricate truss structure, solar array and antenna. Add in to the mix mild current, depth limitations (in this case ceiling), tool and parts management, changing environmental conditions, communication to the Mission Control team, and time and consumable limitations, and you have a surprisingly difficult and formidable task. Crew preparation and planning are keys to the success of this endeavor. You will be happy to learn that as in previous NEEMO missions, the crew was up to the task under the analytical guidance of Nick, who had obviously spent a fair amount of time strategizing on efficient ways to approach the task.
As in previous missions, we are happy to report that the seemingly homeless squadron of barracuda has again quickly taken up residence, this time appearing to prefer the solar array area.
From the beginning of the program, there has always been a strong relationship between the community of divers on the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (the enormous pool where we train astronauts for spacewalks) team and the NEEMO teams. The staff at the NBL has been gracious enough to provide all of our crews with medical and safety training as well as always being supportive of our dive requirements while in Houston. Therefore, we were very pleased when they accepted our offer to have two of the Oceaneering dive staff, Brent Fergurson and Greg Sims, support the mission from here in Key Largo. We are happy to report that the guys dove right into the task and were welcomed by the NURC staff immediately. They have helped transfer down hardware to the crew, scrubbed and performed maintenance on the habitat, “re-worked” our Waterlab tools, and done it all with a smile. That was on Monday…
Finally today, the Aquarius crew got a chance to talk to our old and mutual friend Mike Fincke, the Science Officer aboard the International Space Station. Mike was the Commander of the NEEMO 2 mission, and has always been very supportive of our efforts. Despite some technical difficulties, the two crews had a good chat and got to swap stories about two of the most “out of this world” experiences happening today. Our deepest thanks to the many people that helped make this linkup work today.
Until next time…
- NEEMO Topside Team
Do you ever recall sitting down with a box of Tinkertoys, piled high on the living room floor? Remember taking each piece and meticulously putting them together? Now, take that same box of toys, put them together in nice orderly groups, wrap some rubber bands around the most important ones, shove them into dive bags, and place them on the surface of the ocean. Okay, now don your dive gear, put on a mask, swim to the bottom of the ocean, retrieve each piece and put it all together. Oh yes, each piece must go together in a particular order and you have to line up the bolt holes just right. And if the holes don’t line up, swap ends. If they still don’t line up, figure out what you did wrong and come up with a solution, right there, right now. All the while, mission control is trying to reach you on your communication gear, your own breathing is preventing you from hearing each call. So, you time your breaths to coincide with the call, hoping you might make out part of it. While, unbeknownst to you, your partner notices an extremely large fish, roughly the same size and weight as your 9-year-old daughter has saddled up beside you. You, of course, do not have a clue this aquatic behemoth is within feeding distance. You are too intent on the job at hand. Such is the life of the aquanaut/astronaut.
Another fabulously marvelous day beneath the waves. At least, I think there are waves up there. You can watch your bubbles float to the surface and make out the ripples on top. I have not been down here long enough to determine how big the sea state is, just by looking up. I guess you could eventually, but right now we just don’t have the time to spend looking up. Too much to do down here. That’s exactly the way it is in space. People are always curious what the Earth looks like from above. You spend so much time working, that to actually look at the window for pleasure is a rare occurrence. During my spacewalks, I had to make a conscious effort to look around and appreciate my surroundings. You are sometimes just too busy to really absorb the sights around you. If we had not delayed our landing on STS-113, I would not have taken a picture out of the window for pleasure. That’s like driving by the Grand Canyon with a camera by your side and not bothering to stop because you have to make Las Vegas by nightfall. Been there?
Our water-lab task is certainly a challenge. The pieces are not going together as we planned. We have had to improvise to make it work. Tomorrow, we will tackle the problem as a group of four. We will divide and conquer and we will succeed! This task is another good example of how hard an spacewalk can be. Worksite body position is everything. If you try and accept a position that is not optimal, it will come back to bite you. Steady yourself in your worksite, have your tools at hand, properly tethered, evaluate the hardware, position it accordingly, and blame the engineer when it doesn’t fit right. ;o)
This day has been challenging for all of us. A bit of frustration working the task, difficulties communicating with the ground team, the plan not coming together as we anticipated. Tomorrow we will use the lessons we learned today and make it better. We will rise to the occasion and make the most with what we have at hand. If we had lemons, we could make an ocean of lemonade!