Source: The New York Times
Astronauts will not be sent by the United States to the Moon or Mars for at least a decade, but they can still get an idea of what it would be like by living 65 feet underwater.
On Monday, a crew of six, including two veteran astronauts, descended to Aquarius, an undersea laboratory next to a coral reef about three miles off Key Largo, Fla.
This is the 14th mission in a nine-year-old program known as NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations — Neemo for short.
During their two weeks in the laboratory, the aquanauts will go on simulated spacewalks, operate a crane and perform other tasks of the sort astronauts would face in setting up a habitat on another planet. “The primary objectives are based on engineering and testing and operations design for planetary exploration,” said William Todd, the project manager for the Neemo 14 mission. (It does not look like the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico will affect Neemo.)
Parts of the mission seem quaintly out of date, given the current turmoil enveloping NASA’s human spaceflight program. One of the mock-ups is of the S.U.V.-size Lunar Electric Rover, which may never be built because the Obama administration has proposed scuttling NASA’s Constellation program to send astronauts back to the moon.
To read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/science/space/11neemo.html?scp=2&sq=NASA&st=cse