posted 06-26-2003 11:24 AM
6 more aquanauts to study in Keys
NASA expedition 2-week mission Florida Today 06/26/03
author: Chris Kridler
CAPE CANAVERAL -- While two men orbit Earth on the International Space Station, a crew of six is trying to create a similar experience under the sea in the Keys.
NASA has mounted another NEEMO expedition this summer, headed by veteran station astronaut Peggy Whitson. This two-week mission, dubbed NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 5, is taking place in an undersea laboratory 62 feet deep, about 3 miles off Key Largo.
"Clay and I have done a lot of training on all these things, and this is really the first time as rookies that we've gotten a chance to implement that training and put it to good use," Garrett Reisman said.
He and Clayton Anderson are astronauts in training and part of Whitson's crew, which did several interviews from the lab Wednesday morning.
"We've been learning a lot from Peggy," including teamwork, Reisman said, and "trivial things, as well, that can be very important to your quality of life, like how many ounces of water to put in the scrambled eggs to make them taste good."
The Aquarius laboratory is part of the National Undersea Research Center, which is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and operated by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
The NASA missions are a small part of its work, center director Steven Miller said.
The lab is used mostly to study marine biology, including the coral reefs off the Keys, he said. The center supports research with divers, submarines and underwater robots from North Carolina to Florida.
The NASA "aquanauts," including a scientist and two support crew members, are living among the coral reefs, but many of their experiments are designed to test equipment that could end up on the space station. The gear includes a portable ultrasound, a tool to test hearing and a probe that detects nitrogen bubbles in the blood.
Experiments also look at the biological effects of space-like missions.
For instance, some viruses are common at low levels in the human body, said Emma Hwang, the mission's scientist. "When you are involved in some kind of activity that involves some stress . . . these viruses start to replicate more often," she said.
To test virus levels, the crew is giving up saliva samples twice a day to be compared with samples from astronauts and others.
Last week, the crew, in diving gear, built a structure underwater out of PVC pipes to simulate spacewalk tasks.
"We do have the advantage in having gravity here," Whitson said, "so we can always find what we drop, usually, as long as it sinks."
posted 06-26-2003 11:24 AM
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