Pictures: NASA Lands on Underwater "Asteroid"

"Asteroid" Walker
Photograph courtesy NASA
Today a NASA crew is landing on an "asteroid"—about 60 feet (18 meters) under the sea.
In reality, members of the space agency's NEEMO 15 mission will test ways humans might one day visit asteroids by spending 13 days at an underwater laboratory in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Divers—including the one above using an anchored tether—have been preparing for the mission for months at the Aquarius Reef Base, a NOAA-owned site 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) off Key Largo (map).
Since 2001 crews with NEEMO (for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) have completed 14 missions at Aquarius, mostly training astronauts for work on space shuttles and the International Space Station. The mission starting today is only the second that was primarily designed to test new equipment and operational concepts for deeper space exploration.
Specifically, NEEMO 15 aims to help astronauts figure out how to move around on and collect samples from near-Earth asteroids, many of which are relatively small compared with the moon or Mars and so would have almost zero gravity.
The project doesn't aim to test the actual anchors asteroid-walkers might use, since that technology is still in early stages of development. Instead, NEEMO 15 will evaluate different anchoring setups and how well people interact with them.
The "sea floor itself is being used in most cases to represent the surface of an asteroid," Steve Chappell, the deputy mission manager for NEEMO 15, said via email. In some places, fiberglass "rock walls" stand in for harder surfaces.
—Victoria Jaggard
Published October 20, 2011
Anchors Aweigh
Illustration courtesy NASA
An illustration shows an astronaut moving around the surface of an asteroid on a grid of anchored tethers, a concept to be tested during NASA's NEEMO 15 underwater mission, which began Thursday.
During the mission, the Aquarius undersea lab "will serve as a representation of the Deep Space Habitat [DSH] that would carry the crew over the long journey to and from the asteroid," Chappell said.
"Another vehicle, the multimission Space Exploration Vehicle [SEV], will accompany the DSH on the journey to the asteroid and provide an exploration platform that will get in close to the asteroid and assist crew members" during spacewalks.
In Florida, deep-water submersibles will stand in for the SEVs, and the NEEMO 15 crew will test whether their work is more efficient with different numbers of these vehicles. Mission members will also determine whether they work better in pairs or on solo spacewalks.
(Related: "NASA Asteroid Mission Set for 2016.")
Published October 20, 2011
Walk This Way
Photograph courtesy NASA
NEEMO 15 crew member Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency installs so-called translation lines at the underwater testing ground during training on October 12. The lines will be anchored to the seafloor and the rock walls to help simulate what it would be like to navigate the surface of an asteroid.
During the official mission, Hansen and NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps will be the capsule communicators, aka CAPCOM, the main points of contact between the underwater crew and mission control on the surface.
The crew also includes mission leader Shannon Walker of NASA, astronauts Takuya Onishi of Japan and David Saint-Jacques of Canada, scientist Steven Squyres of Cornell University, and professional aquanauts James Talacek and Nate Bender of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In addition, NASA astronauts Stan Love, Richard Arnold, and Mike Gernhardt will pilot the submersibles.
During the first half of the mission, the underwater crew will be able to communicate with mission control in real time, Chappell said. But for the second half, mission managers will create a 50-second, one-way communications delay, to simulate the average time delay astronauts might face when visiting target asteroids.
(Related: "Astronauts Could Ride Asteroids to Mars, Study Says.")
Published October 20, 2011
Space-Rock Rendezvous
Illustration courtesy NASA
Astronauts perform a spacewalk from an SEV in an illustration of an asteroid-exploration mission.
The NEEMO 15 crew will use Superlite 17 commercial dive systems, with helmets that have umbilical cords attached to the Aquarius habitat or the makeshift SEV. The cords provide air as well as video feeds from the helmet cameras and two-way audio communication.
Each "spacewalking" crew member will "also wear a thruster device to simulate the use of a jet pack," Chappell said. (Related: "'Jet Man' to Cross English Channel Like a Human Rocket.")
Published October 20, 2011
"Alien" Visitors
Photograph courtesy NASA
Accompanied by NEEMO 15 mission members David Saint-Jacques, Shannon Walker, and Takuya Onishi, NASA researcher Margarita Marinova (bottom left) enjoys a swim with denizens of the reef during training near the Aquarius base on October 11.
Members of the NEEMO 15 crew will leave the Aquarius lab in teams of two for about three hours each day to conduct simulated spacewalks, Chappell said.
Inside the Aquarius habitat, the rest of the crew will be performing behavioral-health and performance experiments designed to test the effects of the extreme environment and the communications delay on the team's performance.
(Related: "Why Did 400 People Volunteer for a One-Way Trip to Mars?")
Published October 20, 2011
Dive Training
Photograph courtesy NASA
Engineering divers prepare to visit NASA's underwater "asteroid" during field tests held in May. Test subjects from the crew, utility divers, and support divers spent a week in the spring evaluating equipment and practicing maneuvers to get ready for the October mission.
Since the diving experience doesn't exactly replicate the near zero gravity of an asteroid, "the divers will wear combinations of weight and foam to simulate as close to a well-balanced, neutrally buoyant configuration as possible," Chappell said.
"The actual weight each crew member carries will vary based on what achieves neutral buoyancy for them, but will generally be in the 2- to 5-pound [0.9- to 2.2-kilogram] range, in addition to all their dive gear and other EVA equipment."
(See "NASA to Visit Asteroid Predicted to Hit Earth?")
Published October 20, 2011