Preliminary Call for Interest ESA CAVES PANGAEA
The ESA CAVES team is contacting you because you might be interested in cooperating with a research and testing campaign of the European Space Agency.
The European Space Agency is currently holding two field courses: CAVES and PANGAEA.
CAVES stands for Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills. This course is designed to prepare astronauts for safe and efficient long duration spaceflight operations by means of a realistic scientific and exploration mission in a cave environment within a multicultural, ISS-representative team.
PANGAEA, an acyronym for Planetary ANalogue Geological and Astrobiological Exercise for Astronauts, is a geological training course which includes surface operations and exploration.
During the training courses, astronauts have also preformed scientific experiments and tests of technological tools for sampling.
(More info: http://blogs.esa.int/caves, http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Caves )
ESA is currently developing these courses as a spaceflight analogue platform in order to perform trials of diverse nature, including technological, operational and human-science.
Several companies and research institutes have already expressed their interest in cooperating with CAVES and PANGAEA as analogues.
For this reason, the ESA CAVES team believes you and your organisation might be interested in potential participation.
The attached document provides some more background information about the CAVES and PANGAEA missions.
We kindly ask you, in case you are interested in participating to an analogue mission, to fill out the questionnaire attached in the document and send it to esa.caves@esa.int before the 15th of March.
If you are not able to fill out the questionnaire by this day, please email ESA CAVES stating your intent to respond.
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Best Regards,
The ESA CAVES Team
Astronaut Training Department
European Astronaut Centre
Linder Höhe
51147 Köln, Germany
