NASA NEEMO 9 Mission Journal: Mission Day 12: Friday, April 14th, 2006

Ross Hein: Mission: April, 2006 Saturation

Well, the days down here are packed so full it amazes me to look at my watch and realize another one has gone by. At any given time there are several events going on. Any combination of diving, ROV ops, Robot ops, experiments, live video outreach events, planning conferences etc, etc. Everything is coordinated with our timeline and everything has an acronym so this one is OSTPV “onboard short term planning viewer”. It is quite fitting to say that it is a very fluid schedule (no pun intended). Things are happening at such a pace that when something doesn’t work just right it can be tough to trouble shoot and keep things on schedule or as close to schedule as possible. But that is the reality of exploration so I guess it goes with the territory.

When you stop to think about the complexity of some of these operations it seems amazing some of this stuff works. For example driving an ROV seems pretty straight forward, like a video game right? Well, the when the driver is in Houston the commands go out from Mission Control Houston, out thier firewall onto the internet, across the country, into NURC Base through our computer, up to a wireless link, across the ocean, to the Life Support Bouy, down the umbilical, through a water tight penetration into the Habitat, to a computer, over to the ROV control box, out the umbilical to the ROV……and can you believe its being driven real time. Kinda mind boggling if you ask me.

So this brings to a close another day. We are all tired at the end of each day. So I’m off to my rack to get some shut eye so I can be ready to take it all on again tommorrw Good night from the bottom of the ocean.

Jim Buckley: Mission Day 12: Friday, April 14th, 2006

Mission: April, 2006 Saturation

I just finished day eleven’s journal and here it’s day 12 already.I did a clean-up of the area I could reach with my umbilical. Lots of broken fishing line and hooks. Even though this is a research site and the general public should not be fishing or diving in the area, there sure is a lot of debris.

Superlite-17 ops went fairly smooth today. Dave and Nicole had the morning dives, building a structure called “Waterlab”. This is to simulate a tower that might have to be built on the moon or Mars someday to aid in extending the horizon for communications. Ron and Tim had the afternoon dives, using Cobratac and Linkquest, running a predetermined grid tracking exercise. They were given waypoints and had to navigate to each site using special tracking equipment.

Ross got the afternoon ship’s husbandry. for a few hours each day the techs need to keep on top of cleaning the plumbing, zincs, valves, and cabling. Go a few days without the cleaning and the marine growth can cover an area.

Once again thanks to Topside for all the support.