Our Sunday was pretty action packed. We started with a beautiful dawn dive. We were in the water for a little over 2 hours starting from about 0630. We went out armed with our flashlights, glow sticks and cameras, and had a really nice time watching the sun rise through the water. It was very interesting to watch how the different sea life seemed to cycle their times for waking up. When we first went out there seemed to only be little fishes awake – and there were a lot of them. The bigger fishes started to gradually show up about an hour after we were out. We saw a really large Atlantic stingray sleeping in the sand and a big school of large barracuda swimming over us as we made our way back along the excursion line. We spent some time relaxing on the bottom at about 80 feet, just watching as the sun got brighter above us. It seemed to me that this was a really appropriate way to spend Palm Sunday morning.
When we got back to the habitat things really got rolling with the set up of the surgical robot in the bunk room. Once the robot was set up and the communication network was established, Dr. Mehran Anvari (located at a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario) proceeded to manipulate the robot arms to perform suturing on a simulated patient. This was a medical first because not only did he perform the procedure from a remote location, he also successfully performed the procedure with a 2 sec delay in the communication/video signal that he was receiving as his only reference for the procedure. This is really amazing stuff. As this type of system becomes more robust and proven, it promises to support providing advanced medical treatment for people in remote locations both on and off our planet.
The day just got better when we all were able to talk to our families on a videoconference. It was so nice to be able to see them for a little while and to have a chance to catch up “in person”. The video hug I got at the end really topped it all off!
Today is Palm Sunday and a very appropriate day to conduct our dawn dive. Dave, Nicole, Tim, and I departed from Aquarius before sunrise. We proceeded to the South and found a nice spot on the reef to observe the change is sea life as the environment transitions from night to day. The sea life was spectacular we saw a Spotted Eagle Ray fly by a few feet from us. We also spotted an Atlantic Stingray that had buried itself in the sand for the night. The only part of the ray sticking out above the sand was its eyes and tail. Nicole took a lot of still pictures and I shot a lot of video. When we got low on air we proceeded further South to a glass dome called Kamper which we swam into and filled our tanks. Its interesting to swim up into a glass dome on the bottom of the ocean in 90 feet of water, take your mask off, talk to Aquarius and top off your tanks. All in all we were outside for 2 hours and it was a very rewarding experience. When we returned to Aquarius, we hustled out of our gear and began transforming our bunk room into a robotic surgery suit complete with a state of the art surgical robot. We spent the rest of the afternoon teleconferenced in with the investigation team from Canada. Dr. Mehran Anvari sutured a simulated patient in Aquarius via the surgical robot in our converted bunkroom. It was the first time a robotic surgical operation was performed undersea and the first time a robotic operation was performed with a time delay similar to the delay communicating from the Moon. The highlight of the day was definitely seeing Carmel and the boys in a video family conference. It was great seeing and talking to everyone. Tomorrow is Ronnie and Joseph’s birthday so I’ll end here so I can get their sign ready.
Dawn dive — I awoke at 5:45 in anticipation of our dive this morning. Half asleep, I had a quick bite of oatmeal and got changed into my cold wetsuit. There is nothing quite like the transition from a warm bed to a cold wetsuit to wake you up in the morning! We started our dive brief at 6:15 and climbed down the steps of the wet porch into the dark water to get into our equipment. In addition to our regular gear, we brought flashlights and both a video and still camera to photo-document the underwater sunrise. Tim led us down the Kamper excursion line followed by Ron and Nicole. I followed, watching the orange Cyalume safety light sticks on their tank manifolds glowing in the swirling dark mist. We went to the 75 meter marker that Ron and I had placed last week and attached our cave reels to the excursion line so that we could safely find our way back as we turned towards the reef to the southeast. We stopped in a patch of pure white sand, illuminated by the dancing beams of our flashlights and settled between the coral heads to watch the sunrise. Hundreds of small silvery fish were swimming around me scattering the light of the sunrise. Our bubbles floated towards the surface leaving silvery trails illuminated from above. It reminded me of the beautiful sunrises and sunsets that I saw from the Space Shuttle, which occur every 45 minutes as we orbit the earth every 90 minutes. Once the sun was up we went to the Kamper station to refill our tanks and continued our dive on the adjacent reef. At 8:45 we swam back to the habitat but were unable to enter as our topside divers were bringing in supplies and it would be too crowded on the wet porch. Instead, we proceed out the NE excursion line and refilled out tanks, retuning to the habitat at 9:15 to finish our two hour and twenty minute dive. We were pretty excited talking about the dive and the great photos that we took but quickly dressed to start setting up the robot for the tele-robotic surgery experiment with Dr. Mehran Anvari. With all of us working together we had the bunk room converted to an operating room with the robots in position for Mehran to repair an incision in a piece of simulated tissue. Working with a latency of close to a second, Mehran demonstrated his world class surgical skills by deftly suturing the wound. Later, he performed a similar task with a two second delay. It was a very impressive demonstration of skill and new technology that will change the face of surgical care. Tele-surgical procedures challenge traditional concepts, by demonstrating the reality of operating rooms without walls — where surgeons can use their skills combined with advanced technology to treat patients at a distance. It gives me great pride to know that Canada is a world leader in the telecommunications and robotic technology that enables surgeons to challenge the geographic barriers to health care and improve access to care in remote communities. The application of Canadian space robotic technology has produced Neuroarm, a neurosurgical robot used at the University of Calgary and future surgical robots are being developed based on Canadarm II technology. We finished the day with video-teleconferences with our families and it was great to see the kids and their excitement seeing fish out the viewing port beside our galley table. It has been a tremendous day and I am looking forward to getting to bed early. Tomorrow will be a busy day with multiple dives and ROV operations as well as the science inside the habitat.
The pace onboard Aquarius stayed relentless through Saturday. In addition to a very full schedule, we have been experiencing numerous smaller difficulties, each of which requires time consuming troubleshooting, consultation with specialists, and work arounds. Many of the problems can be traced back to the laptops we use onboard. While these are modern, capable laptops, they have been very trouble plagued throughout this mission. They each display their own quirks, and consequently we’ve given them each their own names! (Names from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, of course.)
You might think that as long it was safe and dry, a computer would be just as happy in space or under the sea as at your desk – but you would be wrong! In space the constant bombardment by high energy (radiation) particles hitting the circuit boards sometimes “upsets” the computation, causing the computer to fail or need to be restarted. In Aquarius we have our own unique challenges. For starters, the increased atmoshpheric pressure squeezes the housings that hold the hard drives, and sometimes they can’t spin up quickly enough for the computer to boot. (We’ve gone through many computers that DIDN’T work trying to find a few that did.) Furthermore, the high humidity environment is no friend to computers. Finally, we are just asking them to do a lot. There’s a lot of software loaded on them for all of our equipment and experiments, and sometimes despite our best intentions, we find that one software package conflicts with others. To make a long story short, for several days now the crew, NURC staff, ExPOC, Topside team and various specialists have been burning the midnight oil trying to overcome these problems and salvage all mission objectives. It’s been inspirational to watch, and a testimony to the capabilities and professionalism of everyone involved.
On Saturday we accomplished an objective we called a “vehicle inspection.” On the International Space Station and Space Shuttle we sometimes need to look at something externally to understand a problem we have or damage that has occurred. This is how the protective tiles on the Space Shuttle get inspected after launch now. The primary method for doing this is to use one of the Canadian-built robotic arms and maneuver it into position so that its video cameras can show the specialists on the ground what is going on. This is a primary method (as opposed to a spacewalk) for two reasons: risk to the crew, and “work efficiency” of a spacewalk (or “EVA” as we call them.) More on work efficiency in a later report…
We envision that periodic inspections of a lunar habitat will be required just as they are on our current space vehicles, and that a robotic system will have a prominent role once again (because spacewalks carry some additional risk by their very nature.) For instance, we may notice that there’s a small leak because the pressure keeps slowly falling inside the habitat. A big enough leak into the vacuum of space might be visible from the outside – kind of like seeing your breath on a cold winter’s day. In our scenario, to play the role of a robotic arm we used our trusty little ROV again. The crew flew it all around the exterior of Aquarius, taking care not to hit Aquarius, but also getting close enough to see little details in the video camera. As for the vehicle inspection, the crew was able to successfully and confidently fly it all around their habitat, and get high resolution imagery while doing so.
NASA is in the early phases of designing the space suit for Lunar and Mars exploration. The Apollo moon walks demonstrated that the weight and center of gravity (c.g). of the space suit and portable life support system backpack were important parameters affecting astronaut performance. To investigate the acceptable c.g. limits for future designs, the NASA EVA Physiology, Systems and Performance Project (EPSP) working in conjunction with the Crew and Thermal Systems engineers have developed reconfigurable c.g back pack that can be worn by divers on “sea walks”. On Saturday the NEEMO divers weighed out at lunar gravity levels (1/6 g), donned the reconfigurable backpacks and performed a series of tasks representative of planetary exploration. These tasks, performed under six different center of gravity configurations included: timed walks, jogs and runs, kneeling, falling and recovering, picking up rocks, shoveling and climbing ladders. The divers evaluated each of the tasks using a modified Cooper-Harper rating scale. The timed ambulation tasks will be compared to a control group performing the same ambulations using a partial gravity weight relief system at the Johnston Space Center. This comparison will allow the data to be adjusted for the effects of water drag.
The advantages of performing these tasks on saturation excursion dives include a real operational environment, unlimited time duration and the ability to investigate the full six degree of freedom work volume. For safety reasons the ground based partial gravity simulators do not allow subjects to fall down. Later this week the divers will perform the same tasks under simulated Martian Gravity conditions. They will also wear the reconfigurable c.g backpacks while performing a structure assembly task. The divers will perform half of the task with the c.g currently planned for the Lunar/Mars suit and the other half with the c.g configuration that had the best Cooper-Harper ratings. This data will be combined with c.g studies in other environments (partial gravity simulator and parabolic flight) to drive out the optimum configuration of the exploration suit portable life support system (backpack).
Thanks for staying with us!
- NEEMO 9 Topside Team
The days are passing by very quickly and we looking forward to every new day and every new challange. Sunday morning and the Aquanauts did a “dawn dive”. This means everyone gets up a little earlier then the normal time for our regular days. During their morning dive the topside support sent down the 2 manipulators and all the extras that go with it. We set it up on the inside and Dr. Anvari from Hamiton ran the surgery. The first time telerobotic remote surgery from underwater has ever been done. Team work. If it wasn’t for our topside support none of this could have happen. With each mission I do, I learn a little more about the habitat and a lot more about myself. Getting to know the Aquanauts in such tight quarters doesn’t take much. We see humor in most of our actions. mistakes are made and we do learn from each one.