NEW YORK: NASA will send its astronauts for future deep space mission into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean
PARIS: NASA will send its astronauts for future deep space missions. To prepare for the same, the agency will send an international crew into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. It will be done as part of the agency’s two week NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 20 expedition, also referred to as ‘NEEMO’.
The expedition will start on July 20. During the project, scientists will be testing many new techniques and tools that may find use for spacewalks in the future in places having different surfaces and levels of gravity.The crew will go into the depths of the ocean with professional habitat technicians and all of them will live together at a depth of 62ft. All will be present at the Florida International University’s Aquarius Reef Base, a research base off the Key Largo coast.
The European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano will command this particular part of the NEEMO 20 mission. Luca has already spent 166 days at the International Space Station. The ESA has sponsored hardware for the project and the undersea crew will test it. The astronauts will also get data on the delay of communication that they can face by some future missions.
NEEMO Project Lead Bill Todd said, “Living and working in the highly operational, isolated and extreme environment of the aquatic realm has provided significant science and engineering for the benefit of human spaceflight”.
