July 15, 2015 • 37 mins
How does NASA test equipment and strategies for deep space here on Earth? Sometimes, they take the plunge underwater. Learn about the NEEMO program and what it means to be an aquanaut.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Pay there and WelCom to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says the seed
is always greener and somebody else's lake. I'm Jonathan Strickland
and I'm Joe McCormick, and our other host, Lauren voc
(00:22):
obamb is not with us today, but she will be
joining us again next week. Hopefully my brain will also
be joining us next week. Where is it right now,
I'll tell you my brain is. It's under the sea, buddy.
It's under the sea down, or it's wetter, or at
least I've heard it's better. I've actually never been under
the sea. What Well, I've swam in the sea. I
guess I've like dunked my head on. Okay, I was
(00:43):
about to say, like, how have you managed to do that? No,
I mean, I've never been to the bottom of the ocean. Well,
I mean depends on what part of the ocean you're
talking about. Two, right, because when you're waiting in your
feet are on the sand, right, Okay, but not you
don't mean to any significance. Actually, I am an aqua knot.
I went to the beach one time. We're going to
(01:05):
talk about aqua nuts today, and aqua nuts are uh there.
There are people working with NASA to develop technologies and
processes and various strategies for dealing with deep space situations
and and tech and tools, but we have to be
(01:25):
able to do it here on Earth because you know,
if you want to test something to make sure that
it can withstand the rigors of space, or that it
needs to uh, that needs to be useful within a
space environment, it's pretty tricky to do here on Earth. Yeah,
that's the thing We've actually talked about a bunch of
times before in various ways. It turns out to be
(01:46):
very difficult to simulate space on Earth cheaply and safely. Yeah,
you've got you know, we've got lots of different environments
that various uh the NASA uses in various emulations of
space environments. Things that Mars colonists pretending to be Mars
colonists out in the middle of the desert somewhere right
(02:07):
or Antarctica or something like that. But still they've got
Earth gravity, they've got air. Yeah. Yeah, if they were
to take their helmet off, they would not suddenly, you know,
turn into Ronnie Cox total recall. They would they would
not do that. So there's there's also another way of
simulating a space environment that does bring into account some
(02:29):
of those issues that you would encounter actually out in space,
and that would be doing this underwater. Underwater has several
of the aspects of space. For one, we obviously need
equipment so that we can continue to breathe while we're there.
And we can't just remove a helmet and be perfectly fine, right,
(02:49):
so we have to we have to sort of like
practice dawning the e v A suit and uh, and
dealing with that. It has unusual pressure conditions, though I'd
say actually going in the opposite direct from what we'd
be dealing with in most of our environments would be
going into in space. So like if you go to
the Moon or space walk or the surface of Mars,
you're going to be dealing with an unusually low pressure environment. Uh.
(03:13):
Dealing with the bottom of the ocean is an unusually
high pressure environment, but still you're dealing with different pressure conditions.
And also you have buoyancy, yeah, yeah, and buoyancy can
help simulate a low gravity environment. So whether you're you know,
you can add some weight to your your suit which
will allow you to simulate different low gravity environments. Infect
(03:35):
NASA does this all the time, and they do this
through a program called NEMO in E E M O.
So this is going to be the main focus of
today's podcast. Yeah, we're gonna be looking at the NEMO
program and what it does and you know how it works, Jonathan,
What does NEMOS stand for? You know, it stands for truth,
(03:57):
and it stands for science and the American way. American way.
It stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. So, um, yeah,
this is all about using the undersea environment to simulate
space in various ways. And uh, it's pretty cool what
they do and how they do it and where they
do it. Uh, And it's it's a clever engineering way
(04:20):
to say, well, how can we test out these things
here on Earth. We're not spending money and potentially putting
people's lives at risk out in space where we don't
know for sure this is gonna work. How can we
be reasonably sure it works by simulating it here? And
it's pretty Based on the name, I'm going to guess
that they operate out of a globe trotting giant underwater
(04:43):
submarine that is disguised to look like in our wall.
Or either that or they, you know, are constantly being
berated by an overly anxious father. You can't go out there, Nemo,
that's the ocean. No, neither of those things are true.
It is, in fact takes place at a laboratory and
(05:05):
undersea laboratory. Oh, that's pretty cool. Called Aquarius now. Uh,
I'm fairly certain that we at least alluded to Aquarius
when we talked about underwater hotels. Uh. So, underwater hotels,
we've we've talked about how there are only a couple
of those that exist, and they are very limited. There.
It's like a one it's like a one room thing.
(05:27):
In one case, it was a underwater observatory meant for
divers that wasn't intended to be an underwater hotel, but
had been repurposed as one. You've definitely talked about Aquarius
on tech stuff. I think I've heard you talk about. Yeah.
So Aquarius is the underwater facility that at one point
um was located off the coast of the US Virgin Islands.
(05:49):
That's originally where it was when it was built back
in nineteen eighty three. And it was originally called the
George F. Bond. Bond was a physician and saturation diver.
Saturation and divers. That's where you are diving to a
point where you're the the oxygen, your blood all gets dissolved,
and then you can hang out in a pressurized um
(06:10):
environment that's at the same pressure as the ambient pressure
of the water around you, and you just you hang out.
You do science, you observe stuff, and it means you
can also go in and out of the water without
any sort of decompression because you are already at the
that ambient pressure. You you've uh become um. You have
(06:32):
adapted to it. However, if you want to go back
up to the surface, you've got to go through decompression
before you can do it, or else you will get
the bends. So I understand that this guy studied how
pressure affects the human body. Yeah, he was actually a
physician and a diver. And uh he was a specialist
in undersea and hyperbaric medicine and m passed away. Uh ine.
(06:53):
So this facility when it was at the US Virgin Islands, Uh,
it suffered some damage. Mostly it was for one thing.
There's just wear and tear where stuff grows on it
and everything. And yeah, if you ever seen one of
these underwater like labs or facilities, they look like heck,
they're just covered with junk and barnacles and stuff. Yeah,
(07:15):
it doesn't look like some sort of pristine like super
villain layer or something like that. It's hard to clean
the exterior of an underwater habitat, and you might not
even want to write like you might be. You might
be wanting it to to you know, not interfere with
the various biome as much as possible. In anyway, it
was damaged because of Hurricane Hugo. It moved through the
(07:39):
area and caused some damage to the facility, so it
was airlifted out. It was actually you know, detached and
sent off to Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was refurbished
and redeployed, but this time off the coast of Key
Largo in the Florida Keys. So that's where it is now.
Well wait, now is this a hotel these days primarily
(08:02):
or do they use it for science? This one's used
for science. This is a science one. Uh, not the
same one as the one that was used as a hotel.
So this one was until fairly recently. It was owned
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAH, and
specifically NOAH had the National Undersea Research Program as the
(08:23):
administrator administrator for the lab. But in two thousand thirteen,
NOAH decided to sell the Aquarius Laboratory. And in fact,
there was a there was a time where people were
worried that it would mean that the the scientific endeavors
would come to an end because NASA is just one
entity that uses this undersea laboratory. It's used for all
(08:46):
sorts of stuff from studying climate change, biology experiments, diving
and medicine experiments, and also NASA uses it for the
simulations of space, so it's used for lots of stuff.
Forged at LEE, the Florida International University took ownership of
the laboratory in two thousand and thirteen out to NASA.
(09:07):
They allow NASA to continue to do their NEMO projects.
So I wonder what's it like inside? It's cozy, first
of all. First of all, to get there, you have
to swim down to reach the actual facility. You're swimming
down around forty seven ft, which about fourteen meters. That
is not the bottom of the ocean. That's on the
(09:28):
ocean floor there. The ocean floor is actually further down.
It's at sixty two ft below the surface, or just
under nineteen meters down. That's where the base plate is.
So you can think of the base plate as being
kind of the anchor point. Uh. And then the facility
itself is on some struts uh. And there is actually
a a an area called um a wet porch which
(09:51):
is or or also known as the the moon pool.
The moon pool is an opening inside the floor of
the facility. Uh. And you just pop up through that.
And because the facility itself is pressurized at the ambient
pressure of the ocean, you can just go from underneath
you you pop under this one divide, go up through
(10:12):
the moon pool, and then you're inside the facility. Yeah,
it's kind of crazy. You don't even need a door.
But because of the pressure condition Yeah, the pressure keeps
the water out. It's just like if you were to
turn a bucket upside down and put it down into
the water. The air is going to keep the water
from coming into the bucket, right. So it seems like
it would be really unfortunate if the facility got turned
upside down. That would not be good. Yeah. There there
(10:34):
are many things that would be not good if you
were in this facility, like structural weakness would be not
good too, or if you lost the connection through your
life support buoy. Yeah, because this is not a the
lab doesn't receive electricity through an onboard generator. It doesn't.
It doesn't have just oxygen tanks supplying the oxygen. It's
connected biblical cord. Ye. Yeah, exactly, It's gonna a biblical
(10:57):
cord that connects to a buoy that floats on the surface,
and it's through that that it receives electricity and oxygen
so that the people down below will be able to survive. Obviously,
that is an important part of doing science, is the
surviving part. Otherwise it's hard to continuously make observations and
(11:18):
test them. Uh. It's right next to a coral reef,
and the science projects performed there can sometimes involve things
like studying coral reef life cycles. If it's not the
NASA ones, but the others projects that happen in there.
As for the facility itself, you win inside of it. Uh,
you would have about four square feet or thirty seven
(11:39):
square meters of space to wander around. UM. The the
wet porch area is actually at and add on to
the um to the facility. It's kind of bolted on.
It's a squared off area that's bolted onto the end
of this almost it almost looks like a pill, like
(12:00):
a gel kept style pill. It kind of looks like
that in shape. It's almost cylindrical UM. And part of
that is because that curved wall structure is very sound
and helps, uh distribute the pressure from the water so
that you don't have these structural weakness points. Right, just
makes sense. So, uh, the main entry is through that
(12:23):
wet porch. There's also a hatch as well in case
they need it. But also it also that's important for decompression.
You know, they have to be able to to if
they need to go back to the service, they have
to go through. I think it's sixteen hours of decompression
before they can leave. Yeah, because otherwise you get the bends.
Hopefully you can read, Yeah, I'm sure you can. Uh.
(12:46):
They were they were talking about like I actually watched
they insist to be bored part of the sis. Like
you get a ball in the cup, the balls attached
to the string strings at Boring. You've got it for prayer. Yeah,
they they Actually I watched videos of some of the
guys who were down there for one of the previous
(13:07):
NEMO projects. By the way, the reason why we're even
talking about this is on July. The twentieth NEMO project
takes place starts on July, but that means there have
been nineteen other ones, And actually was NEMO nineteen that
I saw videos from that that crew. One of the
members of the crew took a whole series of videos
and they are awesome. They're great. They show you around
(13:30):
the facility, they talk about the science they perform and
the experiments they're doing to test space procedures and tools,
and it's really interesting to get, you know, an inside
look at this. But it is really tiny. There are
six bunks, so only six people can stay down here
at a time, and they may stay there for up
to three weeks and ago, so three weeks of being
(13:54):
down in this little can with five other people and
you can't go up to the surface unless you first
go through six hours of decompression. Uh. That sense of
isolation is an important part of what they're doing, because
when you're in space, you are also isolated. So this
it's not just about testing the equipment and the processes
(14:14):
and the tools, but human psychology to test. You know,
is this something we should consider doing because look at
the stress it puts on people, and what are the
best ways of dealing with that stress and are there
ways that can help decrease it so that this sense
of isolation isn't overpowering or causing anxiety. Really interesting stuff. Um,
(14:38):
and you also have windows, so you can actually see
outside and see the little fishy swim by. Not the
operating system, No you don't. I mean you could have
a computer that's running on Windows, but no, I mean
that the actual facility itself has portals that you can
look through and see the beauteous fishies as they swim by,
(14:59):
and possibly say Disney tunes to you. If you have
ocean madness, just kind of like space madness, but it's underwater.
Uh so that's the kind of madness you have to
wait sixteen hours to escape it exactly, which it sounds
like some of the flights I've taken in the past. Uh.
The undersea environment does serve as an analog for space.
(15:22):
Like we said, it's a hostile environment. So just like space,
you have to have protective gear on in order to survive.
You've got to psychologically get used to the hostile environment, right, Yeah,
that's very important. Just as the isolation is a factor,
so is the factor of you've got to get used
to the fact that you are in a place where
without your equipment working properly, you will die. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:42):
that's I mean, that's something that you have to be
able to deal with. Obviously, navigating underwater is not easy,
nor is traveling around in space. They've talked about how
sometimes you encounter a current that's so strong that it's
like walking against a really powerful wind, which could potentially
be something that you would encounter on an alien world,
depending upon where you're going. Um. They also say that,
(16:06):
you know, they want to test the basic tasks that
would be really simple on a normal planet, right, Like, like,
let's say we're on Earth, because we are, and we
wanted to dig a hole, Give me a shovel, I
can dig a hole, and assuming that the ground is
not so hard that I can't shovel, Actually I kind
of doubt your whole digging abilities. You know, I will
(16:27):
test that after this episode, But uh, give me a
shovel and kill me. I can't not threatening to kill you.
So so at any rate, Uh, you know, it may
something that might be easy on the surface of Earth
could be incredibly difficult in other situations. So, for example,
(16:47):
if you're on a a low gravity environment, how hard
would it be to get a course a soil sample,
not coral sample, but a soil sample from that planet,
which would be a typical science experiment that you would
expect astronauts to do on a different planet, like on Mars.
So they've tested this by giving an aqua knot, which
(17:10):
is what they call the the crew that goes down
to Aquarius to test this kind of stuff. Uh, They've
given an aquanaut of shovel. They wait the aquanaut down
to the appropriate level that will simulate the amount of
gravity they would experience on whatever destination they have in mind,
and say, all right, here's the location you need to
go to. We need a soil sample from that location
(17:32):
using this shovel as your tool. And then they observe
to see does it work? Is it hard? How difficult
is it? Is there some way of making that easier
for people when they do go to Mars. So that
they're able to perform the science without it being you know,
despite the tools, instead of because of the tools. They
want to make sure that the tools are useful and
(17:52):
not an impediment. Yeah, and I'm sure it's got to
be similar to extra vehicular activity in space and that
you're dealing with like hard time limits and stuff. Absolutely. Yeah.
You you are only able to stay out there as
long as your oxygen right supply is able to give
you oxygen. So the people who are on these e
v as, the extra vehicular activities, the same thing that
they call them out in space. They refer to anything
(18:14):
that requires you to go outside of the aquarious laboratory
as an e v A, And there could be dozens
of them within a span of a full NEMO project
like the one I looked at for NEMO. I think
it was fifteen or sixteen. There were like twenty two
e v as planned over the course of it. That's
a lot. But you are limited by the amount of
(18:36):
oxygen that you have with you, just as you would
be in space. Uh. You know, sometimes you might have
an umbilical cord attaching you back to the um, to
the to the laboratory, just as you could have a
spacecraft that had that same sort of feature to it,
but even so you're still limited. So that's important. And
it's built in so that when these these tasks are
(19:00):
are transferred from the undersea environment out into space, NASA
can be reasonably sure that the astronauts will be able
to complete them in the time necessary to do so.
If it takes too long to do then it needs
to either be redesigned or abandoned. Yeah, that's crazy. It's
something that I think most people have never even thought
(19:20):
about when it comes to space missions, Just like, how
do you estimate how long it's going to take to
do something in space? And and we're talking about everything
from complex maneuvers like they they have, uh, you know,
they have essentially the equivalent of the jet packs that
that astronauts would use in space to move around, but
(19:40):
they have the water version, like everything from something as
complex as that to something as simple as moving through
a hatch, just to test to make sure that the suits,
which are designed to be as close to space suit
technology as possible, uh, and the hatch itself are designed
such a way that the astronauts can easily move through them. Obviously,
(20:03):
if they can't then that's a problem. Something needs to
be redesigned, either on the suit or on the hatch
or both. And that's why they have these really extensive tests,
is to test everything from the people, to the equipment
to the actual methodology they're using. One other thing that
happens in space is that you know, the further way
from Earth get, the longer it takes for messages to
(20:24):
get from Earth to you and from you back to Earth. Right.
We saw this with the Curiosity rover landing. We people
talked about how the rover had been on the surface
of Mars for several minutes, but we didn't know if
it had landed successfully. So while we're waiting to find out,
it was already happily sitting not happily because I didn't
(20:45):
have emotions, but it was sitting there safely on the
surface of the planet. But we had no way of
knowing because it took time for the information to travel
from Mars to get to Earth. It could only travel
the speed of light. So while I say only in
the speed of light is the best thing in the universe,
that's still a limiting factor. And so in order to
simulate that, NASA puts in essentially artificial delays in communications
(21:11):
and builds that into the various missions. So if people
aboard the aquarious lab need to talk to mission control,
there's a delay, and there's a delay in the message
coming back. It teaches people to be very concise and
very specific when they are communicating, because if what they're
(21:31):
saying is not clear, they have to wait sometimes up
to twenty minutes for them to receive the message saying
I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, and then you have
to do it again, and keeping in mind that the
other people are waiting ten minutes from when they said
it before it gets to you, and then another ten
minutes for your reply to come back. It's very It
indicates the need for clear, concise communication, and it teaches
(21:56):
like NASA how to make these sort of communications more effective.
You know that that's a class they should teach in college.
They've got technical writing, business writing, creative writing, but they
don't have communications styled for interplanetary radio transmission. Obviously I
would fail that course a little at uh So, the
(22:19):
very first NEMO project began on October twenty one, two
thousand one, and like I said, we're moving up on
NEMO twenty now, so, uh, you know, was it like
being there? If you watch those videos, you'll get a
good feel for it. But like I said, it's tight quarters.
You've got six months. They're stationed at one end of
the Aquarius lab um, and you might have somewhere in
(22:43):
the neighborhood of twenty to twenty five different v as
planned for the duration of your mission. They're depending on
and that could last as long as three weeks. Ah,
you would end up testing out lots of different variations
of the same stuff because really you're trying to gather
as much information as possible about things that will potentially
(23:04):
used in space. So there have been NEMO missions where
really it's been all about testing the same space suit
and slightly different configurations to find out which one is
the best one and under various circumstances. Well, I mean
that's important. It is. It sounds incredibly tedious and it
I mean, granted, you're underwater, like you're surrounded by by
(23:25):
amazing marine life, because you're not that far off the
coast of Key Largo. It's not like you're in a
desolate ocean environment. So I'm sure there's lots of stuff
to be like Oh that's awesome, but yeah, exactly like,
oh really that's right down the street. Um, but no,
it's it's it's more about like, you know, you try
out your space suit and one configuration, and then you
(23:46):
try it on a different one, see if that makes
any difference. Tried on the different on see if that
makes any difference. Then you do it with different weights
because that's too similar different gravity, and it maybe that
a space suit for the Moon is not as ideal
on Mars. Eight You might find that one design works
really well for Moon gravity, which is one six of
the Earth's gravity, and others might be better for Mars,
(24:09):
which I think is one third if I'm not mistaken
of our gravity. And so it's really important as you
test out all these different variations, right. Um. So once
you've you know, that's just one part of it. Obviously,
there's the communications part that I talked about, the isolation part,
uh well, and these mundane tests are really critical because
(24:29):
you want to make absolutely certain that every decision you
make when you're sending people out on a space mission,
particularly something like going to Mars, that every decision made
is going to is not going to to endanger the
success of the mission and the safety of the crew.
So things that like a hatch shape or size, they
(24:52):
want to make sure that it's it's economically uh wise,
you know, they don't want to They don't want to
make a three pronged space door where you could drive
a hum vy through it, because you need to have
one astronaut go through. But at the same time, you
don't want it to be small where your suit is
catching on it when you're trying to get through, or
(25:13):
shaped in a weird way. So these tests are while
their mundane are really important. Also, there's a thing called
the center of gravity rig which is a fancy way
of saying a backpack where you could put weights in
different parts of the backpack to change the center of
gravity of an aqua ut um. And that helps NASA
(25:34):
designed space suit equipment that's both useful and safe by
you know, checking to see how this affects an aquanot's
ability to walk around on the surface of the ocean floor.
Ah and uh while we are looking a lot at
space suits and vehicle designs that that's a big part
of what NEMO programs are all about testing is you know,
(25:56):
can can you get in and out of a vehicle
effectively wearing this suit. Obviously finding out that it's not
easy to do when you're on the surface of Mars
is a little too late, right, So you want to
be able to test that out, both the suit and
the vehicle configuration, to make sure that that it all
works together. Um, or you might want to just test
(26:18):
how well you can maneuver and interact with different environments
while wearing that space suit. This is similar to that
idea of taking the shovel and trying to dig with it.
Does the space suit get in the way? Does is
the shovel design properly? Is there something else that needs
to happen in order for this to be as easy
as possible given the conditions that you have to work within.
So it's actually a pretty huge challenge. Uh So, what
(26:43):
specifically is going on this year's NEMO? All right, Well,
it's gonna be a fourteen day mission starting on July twenty,
l I said, And the main purpose is to test
the tools and techniques that could be used by astronauts
who are visiting Mars. So, yeah, specifically looking at at
a potential like if we are to send to Mars one,
are the best practices that we need to follow, and
(27:04):
this is NASA. NASA. That's kind of surprising because I
don't know, I haven't gotten a lot of Uh, we're
definitely sending people to Mars vibes from NASA. Well, there's
been there's been talk about it for you know, for
more than a decade. There's been well, really there's more
for more than several decades. There's been talking of it,
but there's been serious talk for more than a decade
(27:25):
about about pursuing it, and it kind of we have
to keep in mind that goes well, yeah, and there
are different departments within NASA, right, So it's you know,
saying that NASA says blah blah blah is a little
misleading because saying the US government says it may be
in a single official who has no backing with anybody else.
(27:46):
It's possible that that happens. But this is a case
where NASA is also working with the European Space Agency
to test a lot of different equipment. That's cool and
it's so millennial because it's all wearable compute its. It's
all things like like heads up displays, uh, tablets or smartphones,
so you're seeing things like um, a space suit designed
(28:09):
to go underwater right now, that has a tablet or
smartphone type of device on one wrist, so that a
pit boy, yes, essentially a pit boy, that's a good example.
Or a heads up display, which, by the way, at
least for Nemo nineteen, I don't know if this is
the case for twenty Nemo nineteen. The heads up display
(28:29):
Google glass. It's a pair of Google glass, but the
idea being that it would give aqua nuts the ability
to look at a series of steps without taking their
eyes off the task at hand. So for an astronaut,
you can understand this would be incredibly useful. It's kind
of like thinking about the hollow lens right that you
would be in a space environment, you're doing something important.
(28:51):
I don't know. Maybe you're setting down a drill so
that you can put a nuclear bomb in this giant
asteroid that's heading towards Earth. And that way, it has
the list of instructions right in front of you, so
you don't have to look away from the big drill
that's drilling down into Uh. And it would really make
Bruce Willis job much easier, That's what I'm saying. Uh,
maybe it could show you the lyrics to leaving on
a jet plane, so that way you don't screw it up.
(29:13):
If I'm going to continue the army getting references, that,
by the way, is the extent of my army getting
knowledge because I've never actually seen that movie. Oh you haven't. No,
I have not. Well, if you've ever got like three
and forty seven minutes to spend however long it is,
if I just want to make my life seem that
much longer by watching something I'm clearly not going to enjoy.
So this is really cool. Though. The idea that they
(29:34):
will be able to use this technology, and the reason
why I say it's kind of the millennial approach, is
that they're going to be using testing a lot of
different apps as well to see which ones are going
to make potentially make the missions more easy to um,
the more eas easier to complete. Sure, because I mean,
when we're going to space, you need to consider the
effectiveness not just of hardware but of software, right, I mean,
(29:57):
you know what, if you're on that asteroid you want
to play in words, you're gonna especially the Star Wars edition,
which would be really apropos uh no, but seriously, yeah,
you want to be able to make sure the software
is going to be useful. It's not just going to
be like, oh, you can do it this way. You
wanted to make sense, you wanted to be intuitive, you
wanted to be reliable. And it's also going to runnings
(30:21):
two warp yes, yeah, And it's also supposed to stay
in contact with other parts of the mission, and it
incorporates those communication delays we talked about earlier. So when
one person is using their equipment underwater and they're requesting
guidance from mission control, there's going to be that delay
(30:42):
because just as there would be if you were in
space and you were really far away from Earth, you
can't expect an answer to pop up immediately. So it's
to test that as well, to make sure that this
stuff is still useful even given the the UH the
restriction of a communications delay. Communications delays are also very
useful and that it teaches how to improvise right, Like
(31:07):
you might you might have a problem that you have
to address that you need some guidance on. You can
do some maybe some quick work to address it, but
you might need more guidance to actually solve it. Right.
That's the kind of stuff that they are looking into
as well. The idea like, well, these apps may be
(31:27):
able to help some help in certain mission parameters, while
mission control is working for a more permanent solution. Sure, um,
it's clippy for space exploration. I see that you're trying
to establish a Martian colony. Would you like some help?
The commander of this mission is going to be Luca Parmitano,
(31:48):
who is an astronaut who has spent one sixty six
days aboard the International Space Stations of fourteen aboard. The
aquaries should be pretty much easy pickings. That should be
simple walk I'll walk in the ocean. Part Um and
recent NEMO missions have also explored tools and techniques for
astronauts who are attempting a landing on an asteroid. This
one was really cool, the idea being that they use
(32:10):
very little weight because they wanted to try and um
uh simulate a micro gravity environment as close as possible,
and it involved them planting kind of like sort of
like harpoons or anchor points with ropes attached to them
and creating pathways that way so that they would be
able to to maneuver from one part of an asteroid
(32:33):
to another. So if they wanted to do something like
take a specific sample from a particular part of the asteroid. Well,
obviously they're gonna need to figure out a way of
maneuvering around there. How do you how do you get
from one point to the other in a microgravity environment.
That's what that test was all about. So when we
get to the point when we're ready to do that,
because of the the procedures established through the NEMO project,
(32:58):
will have a better idea how to do that in
a in a way that ensure success as closely as
we possibly can. Uh, and that's really exciting. Uh. Those
videos I talked about earlier, Uh, they were from NEMO nineteen. Uh.
Andreas Morgenson or Morgenson I guess I should say, shot
a series of videos while he was aboard the Aquarius,
(33:20):
and they are great. He's he's enthusiastic. Um, he's funny,
and he is uh just really genuine and showing what
they're doing, why they are doing what they're doing. He's
even self deprecating because he talks about how people think
of astronauts as scientists. He's like, really, were lab technicians
the scientist The scientists are back home and we're just
(33:42):
the hands that do what the scientists want us to do.
But we're the people the scientists have deemed expendable, right,
We're Bruce Willis, And uh yeah, it's but it's really
those videos. I cannot recommend them highly enough. They are
really great, a great window into the training program, not
even training, the simulation program um. And in fact, there
(34:05):
are some people who say that you shouldn't even call
them simulations, just call them missions, because they so closely
mirror what is going on in space missions that to
call them otherwise is disingenuous, which was pretty interesting to me.
I think this is really cool. I had no idea
about this program before we looked into it. Yeah, it
was one of those things that had popped up in
(34:25):
my my news feed about how this was coming up
on the twentie mission, and I thought, well, what the
heck is that? When I looked into him, well, that
makes sense, but I had never really heard of it before,
and uh so I really wanted to go into more detail.
And this is the sort of stuff that I find
really inspiring, the idea of how can we as human
beings engineer a situation to mimic something inherently dangerous so
(34:49):
dangerous and so expensive and so difficult to do that
there's not an easy way of testing that stuff right
to make sure it's going to work, And I thought
it was elegant way of doing it until you can
just put yourself into the matrix, the matrix for space
as close as we can get to. Uh So, yeah,
(35:10):
really interesting. Of course obviously if you are, you know,
turning in at night aboard the Aquarius, you're not dealing
with micro gravity anymore. You are, you know, in a
two and a half atmosphere environment, just laying you can
lay horizontal, you don't have to strap yourself into right. Also,
use use of the toilet is slightly less complicated than
(35:30):
is in space. I will say that the NEMO nineteen crew,
one of them was from France, and he brought along
with him French space food, so they were able to
eat because most of the food they have was like
camping food. They have there's a microwave on board. That's
it for the cooking. There's microwave and then there's hot water.
(35:51):
Those are your two options if you want to cook something.
So they ended up bringing the cans of French space food.
It was actually in ends with poll tabs um and
they had to heat it using hot water, and so
I was curious. It's like, I wonder what French space
food is like quail. There was quail, there was salmon,
(36:14):
there was some I can't remember what the dessert was,
but it was very it was quintessentially French, and it
was quite amusing to me. Anyway, those videos are all
on YouTube. You can find those if you search for
Nemo nineteen they'll pop up and I do highly recommend them.
There's also he also recorded video logs of his training
(36:38):
process before going aboard the Aquarius. So it's all there.
It's very good to you know, check it out if
you get a chance. If you guys have any suggestions
for future episodes a Forward Thinking, you should write us.
Are no addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
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(37:00):
search bar will pop right up and we will talk
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in the future of technology, I visit forward Thinking dot com.
H brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Pay there and WelCom to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says the seed
is always greener and somebody else's lake. I'm Jonathan Strickland
and I'm Joe McCormick, and our other host, Lauren voc
(00:22):
obamb is not with us today, but she will be
joining us again next week. Hopefully my brain will also
be joining us next week. Where is it right now,
I'll tell you my brain is. It's under the sea, buddy.
It's under the sea down, or it's wetter, or at
least I've heard it's better. I've actually never been under
the sea. What Well, I've swam in the sea. I
guess I've like dunked my head on. Okay, I was
(00:43):
about to say, like, how have you managed to do that? No,
I mean, I've never been to the bottom of the ocean. Well,
I mean depends on what part of the ocean you're
talking about. Two, right, because when you're waiting in your
feet are on the sand, right, Okay, but not you
don't mean to any significance. Actually, I am an aqua knot.
I went to the beach one time. We're going to
(01:05):
talk about aqua nuts today, and aqua nuts are uh there.
There are people working with NASA to develop technologies and
processes and various strategies for dealing with deep space situations
and and tech and tools, but we have to be
(01:25):
able to do it here on Earth because you know,
if you want to test something to make sure that
it can withstand the rigors of space, or that it
needs to uh, that needs to be useful within a
space environment, it's pretty tricky to do here on Earth. Yeah,
that's the thing We've actually talked about a bunch of
times before in various ways. It turns out to be
(01:46):
very difficult to simulate space on Earth cheaply and safely. Yeah,
you've got you know, we've got lots of different environments
that various uh the NASA uses in various emulations of
space environments. Things that Mars colonists pretending to be Mars
colonists out in the middle of the desert somewhere right
(02:07):
or Antarctica or something like that. But still they've got
Earth gravity, they've got air. Yeah. Yeah, if they were
to take their helmet off, they would not suddenly, you know,
turn into Ronnie Cox total recall. They would they would
not do that. So there's there's also another way of
simulating a space environment that does bring into account some
(02:29):
of those issues that you would encounter actually out in space,
and that would be doing this underwater. Underwater has several
of the aspects of space. For one, we obviously need
equipment so that we can continue to breathe while we're there.
And we can't just remove a helmet and be perfectly fine, right,
(02:49):
so we have to we have to sort of like
practice dawning the e v A suit and uh, and
dealing with that. It has unusual pressure conditions, though I'd
say actually going in the opposite direct from what we'd
be dealing with in most of our environments would be
going into in space. So like if you go to
the Moon or space walk or the surface of Mars,
you're going to be dealing with an unusually low pressure environment. Uh.
(03:13):
Dealing with the bottom of the ocean is an unusually
high pressure environment, but still you're dealing with different pressure conditions.
And also you have buoyancy, yeah, yeah, and buoyancy can
help simulate a low gravity environment. So whether you're you know,
you can add some weight to your your suit which
will allow you to simulate different low gravity environments. Infect
(03:35):
NASA does this all the time, and they do this
through a program called NEMO in E E M O.
So this is going to be the main focus of
today's podcast. Yeah, we're gonna be looking at the NEMO
program and what it does and you know how it works, Jonathan,
What does NEMOS stand for? You know, it stands for truth,
(03:57):
and it stands for science and the American way. American way.
It stands for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. So, um, yeah,
this is all about using the undersea environment to simulate
space in various ways. And uh, it's pretty cool what
they do and how they do it and where they
do it. Uh, And it's it's a clever engineering way
(04:20):
to say, well, how can we test out these things
here on Earth. We're not spending money and potentially putting
people's lives at risk out in space where we don't
know for sure this is gonna work. How can we
be reasonably sure it works by simulating it here? And
it's pretty Based on the name, I'm going to guess
that they operate out of a globe trotting giant underwater
(04:43):
submarine that is disguised to look like in our wall.
Or either that or they, you know, are constantly being
berated by an overly anxious father. You can't go out there, Nemo,
that's the ocean. No, neither of those things are true.
It is, in fact takes place at a laboratory and
(05:05):
undersea laboratory. Oh, that's pretty cool. Called Aquarius now. Uh,
I'm fairly certain that we at least alluded to Aquarius
when we talked about underwater hotels. Uh. So, underwater hotels,
we've we've talked about how there are only a couple
of those that exist, and they are very limited. There.
It's like a one it's like a one room thing.
(05:27):
In one case, it was a underwater observatory meant for
divers that wasn't intended to be an underwater hotel, but
had been repurposed as one. You've definitely talked about Aquarius
on tech stuff. I think I've heard you talk about. Yeah.
So Aquarius is the underwater facility that at one point
um was located off the coast of the US Virgin Islands.
(05:49):
That's originally where it was when it was built back
in nineteen eighty three. And it was originally called the
George F. Bond. Bond was a physician and saturation diver.
Saturation and divers. That's where you are diving to a
point where you're the the oxygen, your blood all gets dissolved,
and then you can hang out in a pressurized um
(06:10):
environment that's at the same pressure as the ambient pressure
of the water around you, and you just you hang out.
You do science, you observe stuff, and it means you
can also go in and out of the water without
any sort of decompression because you are already at the
that ambient pressure. You you've uh become um. You have
(06:32):
adapted to it. However, if you want to go back
up to the surface, you've got to go through decompression
before you can do it, or else you will get
the bends. So I understand that this guy studied how
pressure affects the human body. Yeah, he was actually a
physician and a diver. And uh he was a specialist
in undersea and hyperbaric medicine and m passed away. Uh ine.
(06:53):
So this facility when it was at the US Virgin Islands, Uh,
it suffered some damage. Mostly it was for one thing.
There's just wear and tear where stuff grows on it
and everything. And yeah, if you ever seen one of
these underwater like labs or facilities, they look like heck,
they're just covered with junk and barnacles and stuff. Yeah,
(07:15):
it doesn't look like some sort of pristine like super
villain layer or something like that. It's hard to clean
the exterior of an underwater habitat, and you might not
even want to write like you might be. You might
be wanting it to to you know, not interfere with
the various biome as much as possible. In anyway, it
was damaged because of Hurricane Hugo. It moved through the
(07:39):
area and caused some damage to the facility, so it
was airlifted out. It was actually you know, detached and
sent off to Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was refurbished
and redeployed, but this time off the coast of Key
Largo in the Florida Keys. So that's where it is now.
Well wait, now is this a hotel these days primarily
(08:02):
or do they use it for science? This one's used
for science. This is a science one. Uh, not the
same one as the one that was used as a hotel.
So this one was until fairly recently. It was owned
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAH, and
specifically NOAH had the National Undersea Research Program as the
(08:23):
administrator administrator for the lab. But in two thousand thirteen,
NOAH decided to sell the Aquarius Laboratory. And in fact,
there was a there was a time where people were
worried that it would mean that the the scientific endeavors
would come to an end because NASA is just one
entity that uses this undersea laboratory. It's used for all
(08:46):
sorts of stuff from studying climate change, biology experiments, diving
and medicine experiments, and also NASA uses it for the
simulations of space, so it's used for lots of stuff.
Forged at LEE, the Florida International University took ownership of
the laboratory in two thousand and thirteen out to NASA.
(09:07):
They allow NASA to continue to do their NEMO projects.
So I wonder what's it like inside? It's cozy, first
of all. First of all, to get there, you have
to swim down to reach the actual facility. You're swimming
down around forty seven ft, which about fourteen meters. That
is not the bottom of the ocean. That's on the
(09:28):
ocean floor there. The ocean floor is actually further down.
It's at sixty two ft below the surface, or just
under nineteen meters down. That's where the base plate is.
So you can think of the base plate as being
kind of the anchor point. Uh. And then the facility
itself is on some struts uh. And there is actually
a a an area called um a wet porch which
(09:51):
is or or also known as the the moon pool.
The moon pool is an opening inside the floor of
the facility. Uh. And you just pop up through that.
And because the facility itself is pressurized at the ambient
pressure of the ocean, you can just go from underneath
you you pop under this one divide, go up through
(10:12):
the moon pool, and then you're inside the facility. Yeah,
it's kind of crazy. You don't even need a door.
But because of the pressure condition Yeah, the pressure keeps
the water out. It's just like if you were to
turn a bucket upside down and put it down into
the water. The air is going to keep the water
from coming into the bucket, right. So it seems like
it would be really unfortunate if the facility got turned
upside down. That would not be good. Yeah. There there
(10:34):
are many things that would be not good if you
were in this facility, like structural weakness would be not
good too, or if you lost the connection through your
life support buoy. Yeah, because this is not a the
lab doesn't receive electricity through an onboard generator. It doesn't.
It doesn't have just oxygen tanks supplying the oxygen. It's
connected biblical cord. Ye. Yeah, exactly, It's gonna a biblical
(10:57):
cord that connects to a buoy that floats on the surface,
and it's through that that it receives electricity and oxygen
so that the people down below will be able to survive. Obviously,
that is an important part of doing science, is the
surviving part. Otherwise it's hard to continuously make observations and
(11:18):
test them. Uh. It's right next to a coral reef,
and the science projects performed there can sometimes involve things
like studying coral reef life cycles. If it's not the
NASA ones, but the others projects that happen in there.
As for the facility itself, you win inside of it. Uh,
you would have about four square feet or thirty seven
(11:39):
square meters of space to wander around. UM. The the
wet porch area is actually at and add on to
the um to the facility. It's kind of bolted on.
It's a squared off area that's bolted onto the end
of this almost it almost looks like a pill, like
(12:00):
a gel kept style pill. It kind of looks like
that in shape. It's almost cylindrical UM. And part of
that is because that curved wall structure is very sound
and helps, uh distribute the pressure from the water so
that you don't have these structural weakness points. Right, just
makes sense. So, uh, the main entry is through that
(12:23):
wet porch. There's also a hatch as well in case
they need it. But also it also that's important for decompression.
You know, they have to be able to to if
they need to go back to the service, they have
to go through. I think it's sixteen hours of decompression
before they can leave. Yeah, because otherwise you get the bends.
Hopefully you can read, Yeah, I'm sure you can. Uh.
(12:46):
They were they were talking about like I actually watched
they insist to be bored part of the sis. Like
you get a ball in the cup, the balls attached
to the string strings at Boring. You've got it for prayer. Yeah,
they they Actually I watched videos of some of the
guys who were down there for one of the previous
(13:07):
NEMO projects. By the way, the reason why we're even
talking about this is on July. The twentieth NEMO project
takes place starts on July, but that means there have
been nineteen other ones, And actually was NEMO nineteen that
I saw videos from that that crew. One of the
members of the crew took a whole series of videos
and they are awesome. They're great. They show you around
(13:30):
the facility, they talk about the science they perform and
the experiments they're doing to test space procedures and tools,
and it's really interesting to get, you know, an inside
look at this. But it is really tiny. There are
six bunks, so only six people can stay down here
at a time, and they may stay there for up
to three weeks and ago, so three weeks of being
(13:54):
down in this little can with five other people and
you can't go up to the surface unless you first
go through six hours of decompression. Uh. That sense of
isolation is an important part of what they're doing, because
when you're in space, you are also isolated. So this
it's not just about testing the equipment and the processes
(14:14):
and the tools, but human psychology to test. You know,
is this something we should consider doing because look at
the stress it puts on people, and what are the
best ways of dealing with that stress and are there
ways that can help decrease it so that this sense
of isolation isn't overpowering or causing anxiety. Really interesting stuff. Um,
(14:38):
and you also have windows, so you can actually see
outside and see the little fishy swim by. Not the
operating system, No you don't. I mean you could have
a computer that's running on Windows, but no, I mean
that the actual facility itself has portals that you can
look through and see the beauteous fishies as they swim by,
(14:59):
and possibly say Disney tunes to you. If you have
ocean madness, just kind of like space madness, but it's underwater.
Uh so that's the kind of madness you have to
wait sixteen hours to escape it exactly, which it sounds
like some of the flights I've taken in the past. Uh.
The undersea environment does serve as an analog for space.
(15:22):
Like we said, it's a hostile environment. So just like space,
you have to have protective gear on in order to survive.
You've got to psychologically get used to the hostile environment, right, Yeah,
that's very important. Just as the isolation is a factor,
so is the factor of you've got to get used
to the fact that you are in a place where
without your equipment working properly, you will die. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:42):
that's I mean, that's something that you have to be
able to deal with. Obviously, navigating underwater is not easy,
nor is traveling around in space. They've talked about how
sometimes you encounter a current that's so strong that it's
like walking against a really powerful wind, which could potentially
be something that you would encounter on an alien world,
depending upon where you're going. Um. They also say that,
(16:06):
you know, they want to test the basic tasks that
would be really simple on a normal planet, right, Like, like,
let's say we're on Earth, because we are, and we
wanted to dig a hole, Give me a shovel, I
can dig a hole, and assuming that the ground is
not so hard that I can't shovel, Actually I kind
of doubt your whole digging abilities. You know, I will
(16:27):
test that after this episode, But uh, give me a
shovel and kill me. I can't not threatening to kill you.
So so at any rate, Uh, you know, it may
something that might be easy on the surface of Earth
could be incredibly difficult in other situations. So, for example,
(16:47):
if you're on a a low gravity environment, how hard
would it be to get a course a soil sample,
not coral sample, but a soil sample from that planet,
which would be a typical science experiment that you would
expect astronauts to do on a different planet, like on Mars.
So they've tested this by giving an aqua knot, which
(17:10):
is what they call the the crew that goes down
to Aquarius to test this kind of stuff. Uh, They've
given an aquanaut of shovel. They wait the aquanaut down
to the appropriate level that will simulate the amount of
gravity they would experience on whatever destination they have in mind,
and say, all right, here's the location you need to
go to. We need a soil sample from that location
(17:32):
using this shovel as your tool. And then they observe
to see does it work? Is it hard? How difficult
is it? Is there some way of making that easier
for people when they do go to Mars. So that
they're able to perform the science without it being you know,
despite the tools, instead of because of the tools. They
want to make sure that the tools are useful and
(17:52):
not an impediment. Yeah, and I'm sure it's got to
be similar to extra vehicular activity in space and that
you're dealing with like hard time limits and stuff. Absolutely. Yeah.
You you are only able to stay out there as
long as your oxygen right supply is able to give
you oxygen. So the people who are on these e
v as, the extra vehicular activities, the same thing that
they call them out in space. They refer to anything
(18:14):
that requires you to go outside of the aquarious laboratory
as an e v A, And there could be dozens
of them within a span of a full NEMO project
like the one I looked at for NEMO. I think
it was fifteen or sixteen. There were like twenty two
e v as planned over the course of it. That's
a lot. But you are limited by the amount of
(18:36):
oxygen that you have with you, just as you would
be in space. Uh. You know, sometimes you might have
an umbilical cord attaching you back to the um, to
the to the laboratory, just as you could have a
spacecraft that had that same sort of feature to it,
but even so you're still limited. So that's important. And
it's built in so that when these these tasks are
(19:00):
are transferred from the undersea environment out into space, NASA
can be reasonably sure that the astronauts will be able
to complete them in the time necessary to do so.
If it takes too long to do then it needs
to either be redesigned or abandoned. Yeah, that's crazy. It's
something that I think most people have never even thought
(19:20):
about when it comes to space missions, Just like, how
do you estimate how long it's going to take to
do something in space? And and we're talking about everything
from complex maneuvers like they they have, uh, you know,
they have essentially the equivalent of the jet packs that
that astronauts would use in space to move around, but
(19:40):
they have the water version, like everything from something as
complex as that to something as simple as moving through
a hatch, just to test to make sure that the suits,
which are designed to be as close to space suit
technology as possible, uh, and the hatch itself are designed
such a way that the astronauts can easily move through them. Obviously,
(20:03):
if they can't then that's a problem. Something needs to
be redesigned, either on the suit or on the hatch
or both. And that's why they have these really extensive tests,
is to test everything from the people, to the equipment
to the actual methodology they're using. One other thing that
happens in space is that you know, the further way
from Earth get, the longer it takes for messages to
(20:24):
get from Earth to you and from you back to Earth. Right.
We saw this with the Curiosity rover landing. We people
talked about how the rover had been on the surface
of Mars for several minutes, but we didn't know if
it had landed successfully. So while we're waiting to find out,
it was already happily sitting not happily because I didn't
(20:45):
have emotions, but it was sitting there safely on the
surface of the planet. But we had no way of
knowing because it took time for the information to travel
from Mars to get to Earth. It could only travel
the speed of light. So while I say only in
the speed of light is the best thing in the universe,
that's still a limiting factor. And so in order to
simulate that, NASA puts in essentially artificial delays in communications
(21:11):
and builds that into the various missions. So if people
aboard the aquarious lab need to talk to mission control,
there's a delay, and there's a delay in the message
coming back. It teaches people to be very concise and
very specific when they are communicating, because if what they're
(21:31):
saying is not clear, they have to wait sometimes up
to twenty minutes for them to receive the message saying
I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, and then you have
to do it again, and keeping in mind that the
other people are waiting ten minutes from when they said
it before it gets to you, and then another ten
minutes for your reply to come back. It's very It
indicates the need for clear, concise communication, and it teaches
(21:56):
like NASA how to make these sort of communications more effective.
You know that that's a class they should teach in college.
They've got technical writing, business writing, creative writing, but they
don't have communications styled for interplanetary radio transmission. Obviously I
would fail that course a little at uh So, the
(22:19):
very first NEMO project began on October twenty one, two
thousand one, and like I said, we're moving up on
NEMO twenty now, so, uh, you know, was it like
being there? If you watch those videos, you'll get a
good feel for it. But like I said, it's tight quarters.
You've got six months. They're stationed at one end of
the Aquarius lab um, and you might have somewhere in
(22:43):
the neighborhood of twenty to twenty five different v as
planned for the duration of your mission. They're depending on
and that could last as long as three weeks. Ah,
you would end up testing out lots of different variations
of the same stuff because really you're trying to gather
as much information as possible about things that will potentially
(23:04):
used in space. So there have been NEMO missions where
really it's been all about testing the same space suit
and slightly different configurations to find out which one is
the best one and under various circumstances. Well, I mean
that's important. It is. It sounds incredibly tedious and it
I mean, granted, you're underwater, like you're surrounded by by
(23:25):
amazing marine life, because you're not that far off the
coast of Key Largo. It's not like you're in a
desolate ocean environment. So I'm sure there's lots of stuff
to be like Oh that's awesome, but yeah, exactly like,
oh really that's right down the street. Um, but no,
it's it's it's more about like, you know, you try
out your space suit and one configuration, and then you
(23:46):
try it on a different one, see if that makes
any difference. Tried on the different on see if that
makes any difference. Then you do it with different weights
because that's too similar different gravity, and it maybe that
a space suit for the Moon is not as ideal
on Mars. Eight You might find that one design works
really well for Moon gravity, which is one six of
the Earth's gravity, and others might be better for Mars,
(24:09):
which I think is one third if I'm not mistaken
of our gravity. And so it's really important as you
test out all these different variations, right. Um. So once
you've you know, that's just one part of it. Obviously,
there's the communications part that I talked about, the isolation part,
uh well, and these mundane tests are really critical because
(24:29):
you want to make absolutely certain that every decision you
make when you're sending people out on a space mission,
particularly something like going to Mars, that every decision made
is going to is not going to to endanger the
success of the mission and the safety of the crew.
So things that like a hatch shape or size, they
(24:52):
want to make sure that it's it's economically uh wise,
you know, they don't want to They don't want to
make a three pronged space door where you could drive
a hum vy through it, because you need to have
one astronaut go through. But at the same time, you
don't want it to be small where your suit is
catching on it when you're trying to get through, or
(25:13):
shaped in a weird way. So these tests are while
their mundane are really important. Also, there's a thing called
the center of gravity rig which is a fancy way
of saying a backpack where you could put weights in
different parts of the backpack to change the center of
gravity of an aqua ut um. And that helps NASA
(25:34):
designed space suit equipment that's both useful and safe by
you know, checking to see how this affects an aquanot's
ability to walk around on the surface of the ocean floor.
Ah and uh while we are looking a lot at
space suits and vehicle designs that that's a big part
of what NEMO programs are all about testing is you know,
(25:56):
can can you get in and out of a vehicle
effectively wearing this suit. Obviously finding out that it's not
easy to do when you're on the surface of Mars
is a little too late, right, So you want to
be able to test that out, both the suit and
the vehicle configuration, to make sure that that it all
works together. Um, or you might want to just test
(26:18):
how well you can maneuver and interact with different environments
while wearing that space suit. This is similar to that
idea of taking the shovel and trying to dig with it.
Does the space suit get in the way? Does is
the shovel design properly? Is there something else that needs
to happen in order for this to be as easy
as possible given the conditions that you have to work within.
So it's actually a pretty huge challenge. Uh So, what
(26:43):
specifically is going on this year's NEMO? All right, Well,
it's gonna be a fourteen day mission starting on July twenty,
l I said, And the main purpose is to test
the tools and techniques that could be used by astronauts
who are visiting Mars. So, yeah, specifically looking at at
a potential like if we are to send to Mars one,
are the best practices that we need to follow, and
(27:04):
this is NASA. NASA. That's kind of surprising because I
don't know, I haven't gotten a lot of Uh, we're
definitely sending people to Mars vibes from NASA. Well, there's
been there's been talk about it for you know, for
more than a decade. There's been well, really there's more
for more than several decades. There's been talking of it,
but there's been serious talk for more than a decade
(27:25):
about about pursuing it, and it kind of we have
to keep in mind that goes well, yeah, and there
are different departments within NASA, right, So it's you know,
saying that NASA says blah blah blah is a little
misleading because saying the US government says it may be
in a single official who has no backing with anybody else.
(27:46):
It's possible that that happens. But this is a case
where NASA is also working with the European Space Agency
to test a lot of different equipment. That's cool and
it's so millennial because it's all wearable compute its. It's
all things like like heads up displays, uh, tablets or smartphones,
so you're seeing things like um, a space suit designed
(28:09):
to go underwater right now, that has a tablet or
smartphone type of device on one wrist, so that a
pit boy, yes, essentially a pit boy, that's a good example.
Or a heads up display, which, by the way, at
least for Nemo nineteen, I don't know if this is
the case for twenty Nemo nineteen. The heads up display
(28:29):
Google glass. It's a pair of Google glass, but the
idea being that it would give aqua nuts the ability
to look at a series of steps without taking their
eyes off the task at hand. So for an astronaut,
you can understand this would be incredibly useful. It's kind
of like thinking about the hollow lens right that you
would be in a space environment, you're doing something important.
(28:51):
I don't know. Maybe you're setting down a drill so
that you can put a nuclear bomb in this giant
asteroid that's heading towards Earth. And that way, it has
the list of instructions right in front of you, so
you don't have to look away from the big drill
that's drilling down into Uh. And it would really make
Bruce Willis job much easier, That's what I'm saying. Uh,
maybe it could show you the lyrics to leaving on
a jet plane, so that way you don't screw it up.
(29:13):
If I'm going to continue the army getting references, that,
by the way, is the extent of my army getting
knowledge because I've never actually seen that movie. Oh you haven't. No,
I have not. Well, if you've ever got like three
and forty seven minutes to spend however long it is,
if I just want to make my life seem that
much longer by watching something I'm clearly not going to enjoy.
So this is really cool. Though. The idea that they
(29:34):
will be able to use this technology, and the reason
why I say it's kind of the millennial approach, is
that they're going to be using testing a lot of
different apps as well to see which ones are going
to make potentially make the missions more easy to um,
the more eas easier to complete. Sure, because I mean,
when we're going to space, you need to consider the
effectiveness not just of hardware but of software, right, I mean,
(29:57):
you know what, if you're on that asteroid you want
to play in words, you're gonna especially the Star Wars edition,
which would be really apropos uh no, but seriously, yeah,
you want to be able to make sure the software
is going to be useful. It's not just going to
be like, oh, you can do it this way. You
wanted to make sense, you wanted to be intuitive, you
wanted to be reliable. And it's also going to runnings
(30:21):
two warp yes, yeah, And it's also supposed to stay
in contact with other parts of the mission, and it
incorporates those communication delays we talked about earlier. So when
one person is using their equipment underwater and they're requesting
guidance from mission control, there's going to be that delay
(30:42):
because just as there would be if you were in
space and you were really far away from Earth, you
can't expect an answer to pop up immediately. So it's
to test that as well, to make sure that this
stuff is still useful even given the the UH the
restriction of a communications delay. Communications delays are also very
useful and that it teaches how to improvise right, Like
(31:07):
you might you might have a problem that you have
to address that you need some guidance on. You can
do some maybe some quick work to address it, but
you might need more guidance to actually solve it. Right.
That's the kind of stuff that they are looking into
as well. The idea like, well, these apps may be
(31:27):
able to help some help in certain mission parameters, while
mission control is working for a more permanent solution. Sure, um,
it's clippy for space exploration. I see that you're trying
to establish a Martian colony. Would you like some help?
The commander of this mission is going to be Luca Parmitano,
(31:48):
who is an astronaut who has spent one sixty six
days aboard the International Space Stations of fourteen aboard. The
aquaries should be pretty much easy pickings. That should be
simple walk I'll walk in the ocean. Part Um and
recent NEMO missions have also explored tools and techniques for
astronauts who are attempting a landing on an asteroid. This
one was really cool, the idea being that they use
(32:10):
very little weight because they wanted to try and um
uh simulate a micro gravity environment as close as possible,
and it involved them planting kind of like sort of
like harpoons or anchor points with ropes attached to them
and creating pathways that way so that they would be
able to to maneuver from one part of an asteroid
(32:33):
to another. So if they wanted to do something like
take a specific sample from a particular part of the asteroid. Well,
obviously they're gonna need to figure out a way of
maneuvering around there. How do you how do you get
from one point to the other in a microgravity environment.
That's what that test was all about. So when we
get to the point when we're ready to do that,
because of the the procedures established through the NEMO project,
(32:58):
will have a better idea how to do that in
a in a way that ensure success as closely as
we possibly can. Uh, and that's really exciting. Uh. Those
videos I talked about earlier, Uh, they were from NEMO nineteen. Uh.
Andreas Morgenson or Morgenson I guess I should say, shot
a series of videos while he was aboard the Aquarius,
(33:20):
and they are great. He's he's enthusiastic. Um, he's funny,
and he is uh just really genuine and showing what
they're doing, why they are doing what they're doing. He's
even self deprecating because he talks about how people think
of astronauts as scientists. He's like, really, were lab technicians
the scientist The scientists are back home and we're just
(33:42):
the hands that do what the scientists want us to do.
But we're the people the scientists have deemed expendable, right,
We're Bruce Willis, And uh yeah, it's but it's really
those videos. I cannot recommend them highly enough. They are
really great, a great window into the training program, not
even training, the simulation program um. And in fact, there
(34:05):
are some people who say that you shouldn't even call
them simulations, just call them missions, because they so closely
mirror what is going on in space missions that to
call them otherwise is disingenuous, which was pretty interesting to me.
I think this is really cool. I had no idea
about this program before we looked into it. Yeah, it
was one of those things that had popped up in
(34:25):
my my news feed about how this was coming up
on the twentie mission, and I thought, well, what the
heck is that? When I looked into him, well, that
makes sense, but I had never really heard of it before,
and uh so I really wanted to go into more detail.
And this is the sort of stuff that I find
really inspiring, the idea of how can we as human
beings engineer a situation to mimic something inherently dangerous so
(34:49):
dangerous and so expensive and so difficult to do that
there's not an easy way of testing that stuff right
to make sure it's going to work, And I thought
it was elegant way of doing it until you can
just put yourself into the matrix, the matrix for space
as close as we can get to. Uh So, yeah,
(35:10):
really interesting. Of course obviously if you are, you know,
turning in at night aboard the Aquarius, you're not dealing
with micro gravity anymore. You are, you know, in a
two and a half atmosphere environment, just laying you can
lay horizontal, you don't have to strap yourself into right. Also,
use use of the toilet is slightly less complicated than
(35:30):
is in space. I will say that the NEMO nineteen crew,
one of them was from France, and he brought along
with him French space food, so they were able to
eat because most of the food they have was like
camping food. They have there's a microwave on board. That's
it for the cooking. There's microwave and then there's hot water.
(35:51):
Those are your two options if you want to cook something.
So they ended up bringing the cans of French space food.
It was actually in ends with poll tabs um and
they had to heat it using hot water, and so
I was curious. It's like, I wonder what French space
food is like quail. There was quail, there was salmon,
(36:14):
there was some I can't remember what the dessert was,
but it was very it was quintessentially French, and it
was quite amusing to me. Anyway, those videos are all
on YouTube. You can find those if you search for
Nemo nineteen they'll pop up and I do highly recommend them.
There's also he also recorded video logs of his training
(36:38):
process before going aboard the Aquarius. So it's all there.
It's very good to you know, check it out if
you get a chance. If you guys have any suggestions
for future episodes a Forward Thinking, you should write us.
Are no addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or you can drop us a line on Twitter, Google
Plus or Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus. We are
FW thinking at Facebook. Just search w Thinking of the
(37:00):
search bar will pop right up and we will talk
to you again, really sir. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, I visit forward Thinking dot com.
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