- News

Astronaut / aquanaut Tim Peake is performing science under pressure as part of the NEEMO missions. NEEMO is the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. During the NEEMO missions, the aquanauts live and work in the Aquarius underwater habitat at ambient pressure – meaning that the atmospheric pressure is equal to that of the surrounding water pressure.

The international team are simulating a visit to an asteroid, in the 16th NEEMO mission, which started on the 11 June 2012. The concepts related to the underwater mission are:

• What techniques for anchoring and performing mission operations will be most effective for exploration of an asteroid?
• What robotic systems will best optimize crew activities?
• How will Earth-bound mission control centres communicate with the crew?
• How many crew members are needed to explore a deep space destination such as an asteroid? Would Apollo’s three-person crews be sufficient, or should an extra person or two be added?
• How should mission activities be distributed among crew members up upon reaching the asteroid?
• What effects will communications time delays have on mission operations and behavioural health?

The team are also performing experiments which you can follow on the NASA or ESA Twitter feeds.

Here you can see Tim performing the Sweet Lift experiment with a remote control helicopter to show how it behaves at 2.5 times the pressure at sea level.

The following topics will be addressed in the experiments – we have linked each topic to a related resource on the National STEM Centre eLibrary:
Terminal Velocity
Speed of sound
Carbonation
Density altitude
Bernoulli's Principal
Human observation and senses
Buoyancy
Pressure changes

Image Rights : NASA