NASA will be sending an international crew to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this summer as part of the 14-day expedition called NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 20 or simply NEEMO 20.
Scheduled to start July 20, NEEMO 20 was designed to help the agency prepare for future missions in deep space and so will focus on assessing tools and techniques being developed for future spacewalks across different levels of gravity and types of surfaces on asteroids, moons and even Mars.
According to Bill Todd, project lead for NEEMO, the team is extremely excited about the mission as it represents a big accomplishment to have carried out 20 missions over the last 15 years in the Aquarius.
"Living and working in the highly operational, isolated and extreme environment of the aquatic realm has provided significant science and engineering for the benefit of human spaceflight," he stated, adding that NEEMO's missions were the closest toward simulating spaceflight on Earth.
NEEMO 20 will be testing time delays that may occur in communication lines because of the distance potential mission locations will be in. At the same time, the crew will also be assessing hardware provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) that lets crew members read next steps in procedures without looking away or taking their hands away from their task with help from a head-mounted interface, a smartphone and a tablet.
Luca Parmitano, an astronaut from the ESA, will be commanding the NEEMO 20 mission. In 2013, he flew in space as a crew member of Expeditions 36 to 37 on the International Space Station. There, Parmitano spent 166 days in microgravity, living and working with other astronauts at the ISS. During his first spaceflight, he carried out two spacewalks.
The rest of the crew for the NEEMO 20 mission include Serena Aunon and David Coan from NASA and Norishige Kanai from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Aunon is an astronaut while Coan is an engineer for the agency's EVA Management Office.
Parmitano, Aunon, Coan and Kanai will be joined by two professional habitat technicians aboard the Aquarius. They will be living 62 feel below the Atlantic Ocean's surface, with the Florida International University's undersea research habitat located some 6.2 miles off the Key Largo coat in Florida.
