posted 12-19-2018 01:19 PM               

Space Cover #494: NEEMO 9

NEEMO stands for NASA Extreme Environmental Mission Operations are a serial of missions leaded by NASA and consist in sending astronauts (or candidates of astronauts), engineers and technicians to live and develop several experiments during a maximum of 3 weeks in lab Aquarius installed in front of Key Largo, FL to 3,5 miles of the coast and 62 foot of depth.

Actually 22 NEEMO missions have been carried out completing different proposals.

For mission NEEMO 9 the participants by NASA were: Dafydd Williams (Cdr), Nicole P. Stott, Ronald J. Garan Jr and Timothy J. Broderick (Mission Director).

At this time just Nicole P. Stott (selected in 2000 NASA group of astronauts) is the only one that flew in space, in STS-128, for Expeditions 20 and 21 onboard ISS, and STS-133.

And... what can be found in both space covers above depicted for NEEMO-9?

Please, take carefully postmark dates and places, and cachet too.

NEEMO-9 last from Apr 3rd to Apr 20th, 2006 (19 days) and was tracked from Johnson Space Center Mission Control. All this information is collected in the first cover.

In the second cover same dates appear but the second postmark for mission ending has a wrong date as April 20, 2005 instead of correct April 20, 2006. It is postmarked at Key Largo, FL where subaquatic lab Aquarius is located.

However, the text in cachet offers us a valuable information about dates of NEEMO-9, which was originally scheduled in October 2005 but was postponed to April 2006 due to hurricanes. This kind of information is difficult to find through internet pages, except if some technical paper can be downloaded.

For this reason, sometimes space covers offers additional and valuable information that would be lost if not enclosed in our beloved space covers.