NEEMO 15 will be the first of the undersea missions to simulate a visit to an asteroid. In May, a team of aquanauts set the stage for the tests by working through some of the concepts in an effort to improve efficiency.
"NEEMO 15 will require complex choreography between the submarines and aquanauts living and working in their undersea home," said Bill Todd, NEEMO project manager. "Researching the challenges of exploring an asteroid surface in the undersea realm will be exciting for fans of exploration pioneers Cousteau and Armstrong alike."
[URL=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NEEMO/index.html]NEEMO 15[/URL] will investigate three aspects of a mission to an asteroid: how to anchor to the surface; how to move around; and how best to collect data. Unlike the moon or Mars, an asteroid would have little, if any, gravity to hold astronauts or vehicles, so an anchor will be necessary.
NEEMO 15 will evaluate different anchoring methods and how to connect the multiple anchors to form pathways. The aquanauts and engineers will evaluate different strategies for deploying instruments and moving along a surface without gravity.
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[b]Life on an Asteroid[/b]
NASA is actively making plans to expand the horizons of exploration, and with the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, humans will soon have a way to travel beyond low Earth orbit, to such distant destinations as the moon, Mars, Mars' moons and asteroids. Although many of the questions being asked as part of the NEEMO 15 mission will be applicable in any of those scenarios, the primary focus for 2011 is asteroid exploration.
Asteroid missions present a particular challenge. Unlike a planetary or lunar surface, asteroids have no gravity to anchor vehicles, astronauts and tools to the ground. In that way, a spacewalk on an asteroid is somewhat similar to a spacewalk at the International Space Station. But unlike the space station, the asteroid wasn't built with an astronaut's convenience in mind: there will be no handholds spaced to correspond a spacewalker's reach, or existing interfaces to which foot restraints can be connected.
To work in such an environment, NASA will need to come up with innovative exploration techniques, and analog missions such as NEEMO 15 are the first step in doing so. Simulating a mission to an asteroid in a weightless underwater environment will help NASA understand the nuts and bolts of how to explore and live on an asteroid now, rather than waiting until the first asteroid landing – when to the lessons would be much more difficult and costly to learn – to try out the concepts.
[b]Asteroid-bound aquanauts[/b]
NASA astronaut and former International Space Station (ISS) crew member Shannon Walker leads [URL=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NEEMO/NEEMO15/crew.html]the NEEMO 15 crew[/URL] on their 13-day undersea mission on the Aquarius Underwater Laboratory near Key Largo, Fla.
The NEEMO crew also includes JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques. They are members of the 2009 NASA astronaut class.
Rounding out the crew is Steven Squyres of Cornell University, James Talacek and Nate Bender of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Squyres is the scientific principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. Talacek and Bender are professional aquanauts.
In addition, NASA astronauts Stan Love, Richard Arnold and Mike Gernhardt, all veteran spacewalkers, will participate in the NEEMO mission from the DeepWorker submersible, which they will pilot. The DeepWorker is a small submarine used as an underwater stand-in for the Space Exploration Vehicle, which might someday be used to explore the surface of an asteroid.
Jeremy Hansen and Jeanette Epps, members of the 2009 astronaut class, are the capsule communicators for the mission. Hansen is from the Canadian Space Agency, and Epps from NASA.