Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Talking With the NEEMO Aquanauts

Episode Date: August 13, 2007

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Astronauts become aquanauts, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Move over, SpongeBob. Off the coast of Florida, 60 feet below the surface, sits the Aquarius undersea habitat. Even a space shuttle endeavor circles overhead. Three astronauts and a NASA engineer have become aquanauts, spending nine days on a simulated moon mission. What a treat it was to talk with them during a break from their busy schedule. You're about to hear part of that conversation. We've also got a brand new Q&A from Emily Lakdawalla coming up, while Bruce Betts and I will introduce a new verb during today's What's

Up Look at the Night Sky. We want to save as much time as possible for our aquanauts, so we'll limit the news to STS-118. Endeavour is indeed in the midst of its mission to the International Space Station. Inspection of damaged tiles has been completed, and NASA was still deciding whether a spacewalk would be needed to make repairs. Emily's on fire with this Q&A. We'll visit the NEEMO-13 crew in a minute. Practice holding your breath. is holding your breath. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked,

if Titan's atmosphere is made of methane and explosive gas, why didn't the atmosphere burn when Huygens entered it? Titan's atmosphere is mostly made of nitrogen, but it does contain a few percent methane. And it's true that when the Huygens atmospheric probe descended toward Titan, the friction of its fall generated temperatures rising to thousands of degrees, producing a white-hot flare. But these temperatures could not burn the methane because Titan's atmosphere is missing a necessary ingredient for fire, an oxidizer. On Earth, the atmosphere contains lots of molecular oxygen, which is a potent oxidizer. There is no such chemical in Titan's atmosphere,

so no matter how hot things get, the air will not burn. However, therein lies an opportunity for future Titan explorers. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, that's NEEMO. The NEEMO-13 crew gathered around a conference phone in the Aquarius undersea station a few days ago so that we could hear about their submariner experience. Commanding the group is veteran space shuttle astronaut and NEEMO aquanaut Nicholas Patrick.

You'll also hear from Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, as well as Constellation Program engineer Christopher Getty. As I spoke with them during a media conference, I kept an eye on one of the Aquarius webcams that you can find on the NEEMO site. We've got a link at planetary.org slash radio. You look great on the webcam, by the way. Oh, that's because you're seeing Rick and Satoshi. The rest of us are hiding. Really, let me start, Nick, with a question for you about how the experience, even psychologically, differs between where you've been 100 miles up,

between that and 20 meters down. It's a good question, and there are many components to the answer. One of the most important similarities is the fact that you're really on a mission. This is training, it's experimentation, but it's also a real mission in an environment where there are real consequences for decisions and where the equipment is complicated and expensive and really needs to be looked after carefully. There are no quick fixes to problems that you cause if you're careless. So it's really valuable for everybody, even for me having been in space, to be in an environment where the consequences of my

decisions are important and immediate. The second thing is that there's a lot of timeline pressure, and I don't mean that in a particularly negative way, but there's a timeline we have to follow. There are things that need to get done. We rely on each other to do those things on time, and the ground's relying on us. And that's very like a shuttle flight. From the minute you get down here on splashdown day, you're hustling to get all the jobs on the timeline done, and it's fairly constant from when you wake up to when you go to sleep

and sometimes well after when you should go to sleep. And that's just like a shuttle flight. And I think it gives everybody a good sense, as I look around the table here, of what their space flight, their first space flight, is going to be like. Finally, it's a place where you have a different view of the planet. In a few minutes, you have to look out of the window, although we don't quite have the same view they have right now from Endeavour and from the International Space Station, we have a unique view, a unique perspective on the planet.

And that's something very special that I think all of us will treasure for many years to come. Well, here's sort of a follow-up, and that's just to open that question to your colleagues there who may not have been to space, but I just wonder how this experience compares with what they faced in other training. This is Ricky. I can speak to that a little bit and then give Satoshi or Chris a chance. There's a couple of things that strike me. The longest we will simulate something at Johnson Space Center prior to being assigned to a flight is eight hours. And you're on an eight-hour timeline doing a long simulation. And it's busy, as Nick said.

The timeline has got to be kept, and there are people counting on you to get your job done. But at the end of the eight hours, you can go back to your desk and clean out your e-mail account and get the rest of the work done you have to get done and then go home. clean out your email account and get the rest of the work done you have to get done and then go home. Here it's kind of a constant, you finish your day and you wake up and you pick up the pace again in the morning. And I think that kind of experience is invaluable. The other part of that is having someone here with us who has actually flown in space and can speak to the similarities and differences that enable us to maximize our experience here. When Nick sits and talks to us, well, on a mission, this is what we would be doing

and how we'd be doing differently, or this is exactly like it would be on a shuttle or a shuttle mission. And so those two pieces, I think, really help us to prepare for our eventual mission one day. All through our training here at NERC, at the National Undersea Research Center, it was emphasized to us how very important it is. The phrase they use is, the surface is not an option. So our mindset is very much that we cannot go up. We have to stay below 40 feet. And although the consequences for coming up to the surface, as you mentioned,

aren't quite as severe as they would be if we were in space thinking about going downhill, nonetheless, we treat it as a serious and hard constraint, and I can't imagine any of us breaking it. So I think that analog is really accurate. You know, in the shuttle, if you had a propellant leak or multiple fuel cell problems and you needed to come home, you could come home in a few hours. If we had a similar problem down here in the Hab, we could also come home and it would take a few hours, maybe half a day. So I think actually these things are very analogous.

We've really enjoyed our time down here. As Satoshi is nodding in agreement, it's a really unique opportunity to be weighed out and to simulate walking on the moon. It's just really the only place we can really do this for a long period of time. And this is a thrill, I think, for all the crew to be able to do that and to know that the stuff we're doing is going to contribute to the spacesuit that astronauts will wear on the moon. This is Satoshi.

We are very happy to have an experience to watch the launch from under the sea. Especially, this is Nick, especially since that mission had two Aquanaut veterans on board. The space station, as you know, already has one. So there are an awful lot of Aquanauts both above the planet and beneath the surface doing missions at the same time, and that's fun. One of the most interesting things or the striking things to me is that in my past, I've gone down and studied an ecosystem, and you're kind of on the outside looking in and trying to figure out what's going on. But Aquarius has been here long enough that it actually has taken on all the –

looking out the window as I say this – with all the stuff growing on and around, and it has really become an ecosystem unto itself. It has really become a reef. It's just been here long enough that the ecosystem around it has matured enough that I think it could classify it as its own reef. And so we have the unique perspective of being inside the ecosystem and looking out. And when the lights are on at night, the fish actually come and look in the window to see kind of what we're doing, which is a very unique experience than

what you would have at Shipboard Life or just paying a brief visit down to a reef on scuba or snorkel. One of the interesting things while we're out doing these center of gravity and optimal weight studies for the design of the next spacesuit, I think we all found ourselves doing things that when we're given a task to pick up a rock or to shovel or to move from one point to another, they've got some things nailed down pretty well because we found we were doing things and compensating the same way the Apollo astronauts did just the way you bend down to pick up a rock you have to do it differently and those guys

figured it out a long time ago and we caught ourselves solving those problems the same way and this is Nick I would add that when you're out there hard hat diving with an umbilical trailing back to habitat and the visibility is a little low as it was on Mission Day 2,

you look back up at the habitat, it looks just like a lander standing on the surface of another planet. And if you look in our Mission Day 2 journal, which I hope you will be able to see soon, you'll see a picture in there of Satoshi standing on the ocean floor with the habitat behind him. And it's so easy to picture all of this happening on Mars, and that's a wonderful experience. We'll hear more from the undersea crew of the NEEMO 13 mission after a break. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the

disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do, too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and

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I'm Matt Kaplan. We've taken you thousands of light years into space. Now we're 20 meters under the Atlantic Ocean. Talking to members of the NEMO 13 crew who are gathered around their kitchen table in the Aquarius undersea station. Nicholas Patrick, Richard Arnold, and Satoshi Furukawa are astronauts. Christopher Getty is a NASA engineer, and he responded to my next question. Describe the environment down there, your living conditions, and maybe start with the view through that port that you're all sitting around. Well, the view out the port, it's a bit hazy today, but we are constantly greeted by a small, and I'll have to look at Ricky to identify the actual fish, but they're always looking in.

It does seem like we're in an aquarium ourselves. Right out to our port side is a marker, a marker that was placed last mission by NOAA, and that will eventually have a GPS transponder on it. So there's a little bit of technology out the window. But other than that, the reef is beautiful. The structure of the habitat is really, there isn't any part of the habitat that doesn't have aquatic life on it. And it's really just beautiful to see. I would characterize the view outside with a color.

If you look out the pictures of the moon, if you look at the pictures of the moon from Apollo, you see a black and white landscape. And if you look at pictures of Mars, you see an orange, red, and brown landscape. And what we have is essentially a blue landscape. The color is quite distinctive. You get used to it after a while. Your eyes can still see the red where there should be red. But if you look at photographs, you realize

that that red is all missing. Inside the habitat is a different thing altogether. This habitat is about the size of a space station module, say the service module, but it's built very differently. Instead of being lightweight, a lightweight aerospace structure, this is a heavy marine structure, and no better place to see that than the doors and the portholes. You can probably see. And the ceiling above your phone. I think this porthole has something like 53 quarter-inch bolts through it,

and glass that's every bit as thick as glass on the space station. The doors must weigh 500 pounds if they weigh an ounce, and this place is really built to last. It's a lot of fun. The striking thing to me about this setup is the wet porch, which is where we enter into the outside environment. Then we have the entry lot, which is right next to the wet porch, so it gets a little humid there.

And then back here where we eat and we sleep is the relative humidity between the two and between the three areas. And, you know, studying how to live on the moon lately, I've kind of equated that to our lunar dust problem, how we've got this door to the outside world that's going to bring in a bunch of dust. So we have to find a way to mitigate that and to keep all the dust where it is and then sleep and eat in an area that's relatively free of dust. But really everything here is tolerant of the humidity. So I kind of equate the humidity to the dust that we're going to see on the moon. We think a crew that went to Mars, the first crews that go to Mars certainly, won't know until they get there exactly how much of a problem, for example,

that Martian dust is at the end of an EVA or exactly how much of a problem 40% of 1G is when you're trying to do rock collection or drive an ROV. And now that we know some of those things about this environment, I think we can better plan tomorrow's EVA, for example. And that's something we should have done by tonight. That plan will get sent topside. They'll look at it. We look forward to their advice about it, but I'm sure that they will be inclined to accept the proposal we give them.

Very interesting. I wonder how quickly you get used to the ambient noise level there, which I'm sure is much like the shuttle or the ISS. the ambient noise level there, which I'm sure is much like the Shuttle or the ISS. It's less than the Shuttle and less than ISS, but it's very noticeable. We'd actually all forgotten about this until you mentioned it. Sorry about that. It's nothing like the air conditioning. It's fine. On station and Shuttle, the noise, while not unpleasant, is constant,

and you do get used to it. Here it's a little easier to get used to it, a little quieter. In fact I brought earplugs to sleep with and I haven't used them once because the noise just isn't that objectionable, you really get used to it. But that is something that space travelers need to consider is how well they're going to adjust to the environmental control system's constant output of noise? The thing I'm most looking forward to in the rest of this mission is actually getting away from the habitat a long distance and really on foot, which is not something you do in the water very much.

It's not something we did at all on my previous NEEMO mission. So I think getting away from the habitat and exploring on foot will give me a sense of lunar exploration unlike any other I have here on Earth, and I'm looking forward to it a lot. And this is Ricky. One of the tests we do have to accomplish is building a simulated communication

tower and deploying a solar array to power that tower. And I think that's going to be interesting because, as Nick said, we're going to be out walking. But this is a real test that's going to be accomplished on the moon one day. And to think that we're going to be down here doing that, and a few years from now someone else is going to be on another planet doing that is pretty impressive. I'm looking forward to the – well, the last few days have been very structured and very – it dictated everything was down to the few minutes that we had to start and stop. But I'm curious to see how the mission unfolds now that we know exactly what we have to do. And it may even be busier, but we being here can organize and structure our day the way it best works.

And one of the things that we haven't really been able to nail down yet is just how important autonomy is. And that's the thing I think we're most excited to learn in the next few days. Gentlemen, I want to wish you a successful remainder of the mission and an easy return to the surface. And check out that little figure that somebody is hoping you'll find above those logos near the webcam. We'll take a look for it right after this. We'll investigate. Thank you very much, Matt.

Richard Arnold, Satoshi Furukawa, Christopher Getty, and Nicholas Patrick on the NEEMO-13 mission 60 feet under the sea in the Aquarius habitat. You can hear the entire 50-minute conversation, including questions from my colleagues Tarek Malik of Space.com and Keith Cowan of Spaceref.com. Check planetary.org slash radio for that link, along with one for the NEEMO website, which includes the Aquarius webcams. If you're lucky, you might see the little doll or figure I saw in the main lock webcam shot.

I'll be right back with Bruce Batts and What's Up. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. The methane in Titan's atmosphere will not burn without the help of an oxidizing agent. But let's suppose that we want to send some human explorers to Titan in the future. Any human explorers wouldn't necessarily be traveling with a large supply of oxygen, or would be creating it from Titan's ice. With the same oxygen supply, the humans could burn methane from Titan's atmosphere to generate heat or power. In a way, they'd be doing exactly the reverse of what we do

to generate power here on Earth. On Earth, we put hydrocarbon gas in a tank and burn it with oxygen from the air. On Titan, we'd have oxygen in a tank and burn it with hydrocarbons from the air. The same process could work in the atmospheres of the giant planets. The giant planets contain huge amounts of hydrogen, another gas that burns readily in the presence of oxygen. Someday, oxygen-powered airships could be cruising the skies of Titan and Jupiter with or without human passengers. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. So here we are again with What's Up? A look at the night sky with Bruce Betts, Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Once more, recording at the Planetary Society, but we're in Studio B today. We are. We've been kicked out of Studio A. Right. I think it's something you did.

Yeah, Studio B, which otherwise is known as Emily's office. Now there's a big solar sail meeting out back. Complete with Russians and everything. The Russians are here. The Russians are here. The Russians are here. The Russians have taken over Studio A. Well, tell us about the night sky that they'll see tonight. If they go out and look tonight or in the next few nights.

Well, I've got to mention the Perseids again because if you hear the show over the web or catch it early on, you can still catch some good Perseids. Again, it's kind of a broad peak. So anytime up until at least the 15th, you should be able to go out and stare up at the night sky. Later in the evening is better. Most important thing is dark sight and have patience. Get maybe at the peak, which is actually the 12th and 13th, you can have 60 or even 100 an hour. And most importantly, don't forget the total lunar eclipse if it's where you can see it.

Total lunar eclipse, moon going into the Earth's shadow occurring August 27th or 28th, depending on your time zone, visible from throughout most of Eastern Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Yay! So we'll be going out and seeing it. Go to NASA's eclipse site for good information on the details of it. And I know you put that link on there last week. Let's put that up again. I will. And go to planetary.org slash radio and then find

the links for the show. And it'll take you right there. You also can continue to see gloriously wonderful beautiful Jupiter in the evening sky looking over to the west after sunset or the south or the north if you're in the southern hemisphere. It's the brightest

star-like object that's up right now mars up in the middle of the night looking kind of dim and reddish and up pretty high it'll get brighter as the days go on i should mention once again that email rumor kicking around that not only will mars be brighter than practically ever but it will be as big as the full moon is Is that thing making the rounds again? It is. Surely we'll put up something on the website again, once again debunking it. But never, ever, ever will it appear as more than a point of light with your naked eye. This was such a great, is such a great month for the night sky that we now have to hurry

through the rest of the piece because there's just so much going on. All right. You ready? Okay. Okay. This week in space history, 1999, Cassini flew by Earth. Now it's exploring Saturn. On to random space fact.

The sun is about 440,000 times. I have to react to that. That was the unique approach. Okay. You said hurry. I know. And now I've used up all the time again. All right.

We'll try again. The sun is about 440,000. That's 440,000 times brighter than the full moon. And the full moon is more than 30,000 times brighter than the brightest star in our sky, as seen from Earth. 30,000? The moon? The moon. Wow. Wow. I had no idea. Well, now you do. So I love this show. Exactly. It's a learning, joyful learning experience. On to the trivia contest. In honor of Phoenix getting off and launching, we asked you what area did the first successful Martian lander land in, Viking 1. Where did it land? How'd we do?

How'd we do? Too much caffeine. No, this was fascinating because we had a lot of entries, more than usual, not one that didn't get it right. And there is one special one, not a winner, but it's this fellow that I actually happen to know, Craig Journet, who enters just about every week. And he said, sure enough, that it landed. Now, help me out here, because I used to know how to pronounce this. Viking 1 landed on Mars, July 20, 1976, on the western slope of Crissy, Planitia. Yes. And again, I'm not sure scientists are the best at things like Latin. But that's how it's generally pronounced in the community, Chrissy Planitia.

So Craig got it right. But I was going to mention another one from our friend Torsten Zimmer, who often makes us laugh. I was going to bring him up whether he won or not. He won. Random.org picked him out. So we get to kill two birds here, so to speak. He says that, and remember

of course that there was the Viking orbiter which stayed up in orbit. Two Viking orbiters. Right, yeah. He said, the Viking orbiter is still immensely jealous since it didn't land anywhere at all. I went all the way and then I was not allowed to do the final miles. They simply Mike Collins me, the disappointed orbiter said in an interview.

Mike Collins. So when I wrote back to him and when I stopped laughing, yeah, because I thought that was very funny. And he said, you know, maybe we should simplify it and just, you know, make it into one word. And it's M I Ci-n-s-e-d and here it is in use damn i drove that woman all the way to her home but then she mike collins me oh poor michael collins that's cruel isn't it we're sorry yeah if he writes to us we'll give him a t-shirt like collins yeah okay i agree i hope he's out heck anyone out there who's walked on the moon or been around the moon. You betcha. Anyone who's Mike Collins the moon, go ahead and let us know you're listening and we'll send you a t-shirt. Absolutely right. Oh, now you want to hurry again.

Like I was the one who took all that time just now. All right. Next question. Priorities. Who? Who's the third woman in space? The third woman in space? The third woman in space. Who's the third woman in space? The third woman in space? The third woman in space.

Who's the third woman in space? I might know. I think I know. Don't say it. Don't say it. How do people enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to get your entry into us. When do they need to get that in by?

They got to get it in this time by the 20th, August 20th, 2007, at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's our time. One other favor we'd like to ask. Well, a couple favors. One, when you send your trivia contest in, let us know where you hear us. And secondly, go to planetary.org slash radio. Take 10 seconds. Go there.

Go there right now. Because we've got a new spiffy little thing called a cluster map that will note on a pretty little map where you are logging in from. It will not log any other information about you. You don't even have to communicate with us. But if you do that, then you can get your little town or city or country or continent represented. Yeah, it puts these cute little globs on the map of the Earth. And it's very cool. I mean, even if you're like the only person from your portion

of this planet you'll get a little blob there and of course the bigger blob if a lot more people are are going to that book to go to the blob all you have to do is hit planetary.org slash radio and then you can uh you know go back to your cheesecake no we cheesecake i'm sorry i'm hungry how could you be hungry you just ate that. That's what I do. Now, we should point out that it only displays the people who've gone to that page, planetary.org slash radio. We've got tons of other people who access us via iTunes and even the page that is specific to the show. But it's still really cute. That's true.

That's all about us. Speaking of us, everybody, go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about camellias. I stunned you. You have. I thought maybe there was more to it. No, I'm fine. Hi, everyone. Lunch is available downstairs. Oh, well, then we've got to go. It's time to eat again. We've got to go. And from the camellia capital

of the world, Sacramento, California. Of course, I even knew that. There you go. Well, congratulations, and here's a flower. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Ooh, it smells like nothing. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.