Today it was even more difficult to get up than yesterday. I'm never exhausted physically - i.e., the work we do isn't particularly tiring, but it must be very cumulative. I'm not sore, but when it's time to go to sleep the tiny bunk and crackling shrimp don't seem to matter. Once again I slept soundly. A "deep" sleep, you might say... :-)

Today, the level of diving and team coordination steps up a notch. We will be assembling "waterlab" for the next three days, and our mission control center (MCC) team in Houston is involved too. Waterlab is a large, 3-dimensional structure made of PVC pipe. It is somewhat analogous to doing a typical construction task in space, especially with the MCC team helping along the way by providing instruction and advice. It is roughly 8 feet tall, 10 feet long, and 4 feet deep, and each piece comes together with a bolt, two washers, and a nut. Securing it to bottom will be crucial, otherwise the current will cause problems as we start building up off the seafloor.

We also have the first of our educational outreach events today - a live webcast. Mike and I will be out working on waterlab when the webcast begins. The plan is for us to come over to the main viewport to answer a few questions using our underwater communication equipment. If our timing is right, we will finish our dive about the time the webcast wraps up. I'm really looking forward to this. While I am immensely enjoying all of the cool things we are doing - knee deep in real-time operations - I long to share it with those that might be interested and haven't been blessed with this opportunity. I got to college, declared a major in Aerospace Engineering, and didn't even know what an engineer was. Somewhere along the way the system wasn't showing me all the great opportunities out there in life, and I know that there are millions of kids around the world who likewise have no idea jobs like these even exist, much less could be theirs some day if they're interested. I feel like I have a responsibility to promote these opportunities. I'm really hoping these events today and tomorrow go well.

Speaking of promotion, I understand our USA Today article did make the newsstands today. We were given the chance to review it for accuracy, but because of time constraints we each basically just got to verify that our own quotes were accurate. We spent at least half an hour trying to wordsmith a comparison between the minimum time to leave here and be safely at the surface, and the time it takes to leave space and be safely home. Eventually I think we settled on something, but the point is that I don't think anyone on the crew, at least not I, got to read the whole thing. I still haven't seen it, but I understand that I was promoted to astronaut status today. I keep thinking the president or at least administrator of NASA should call me and make it official, but that hasn't happened yet. Could it just be a typo?!? [Editor's Note: Sorry Mark, you will remain earthbound but "inner space" is yours for six more days.]

Afternoon

The webcast was a success, I'm told. Mike and I were outside and came to the window to wave hello at the beginning. We seem to have the comm figured out between Aquarius and the aquanauts, and between ourselves in the water. However, we did take one question from the water and while it was heard clearly inside Aquarius, it lost signal strength somewhere and was garbled by the time it got out on the web. That was the last question we got! They did show us coming back into the wet porch at the end of the dive, but he couldn't get very close to us because the humidity is so high in the Wet Porch that the camera fogs over. Also, the link we're using to talk to Houston is via Netmeeting, which has some problems. It's improving day by day, thanks to Ryan's Herculean efforts, but it is still spotty at times. Overall I'm very pleased with the comm. system. It is still pretty amazing to me that we can do it at all - talking from underwater, almost four miles offshore, out on the reef, back to Houston. Amazing.

Our construction task went well this morning. Suni and Dan got an earlier start than Mike and I, and really helped us out by bringing our materials from the deployment site back to the final construction area. Mike and I were out for nearly 3 hours at 60 feet this morning and we are way ahead of schedule building Waterlab. Bill Todd and Monika Schultz, our Surface Support Team dived down today and video and photo documented everything we were doing. They weren't on comm, so we weren't able to talk to them, but it was nice to see our friends and exchange hugs before they ran low on air and had to depart. We also have a planner here from Houston, Michelle Lucas, who has been working really hard "re-planning" each day as well as making operations appear seamless from our perspective. Hopefully, she will get out on a dive before it's over, too.

We got our first visit from the doctors today. They come down routinely every 2 or 3 days just to look in our ears, at any cuts or abrasions we may have, and generally to get a sense of how we're doing. This place is such a great environment for bacteria, with the high humidity and constant skin exposure to the nutrient rich and bacteria filled sea. You really have to stay on top of any problems, right away. Skin sores or rashes, cuts, acne, and especially ears can easily go from something you wouldn't think much about to a raging infection. I send the docs (Christian Petersen from the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center out of Panama City, Florida, and Bob Long from Duke University Medical Center) a special thanks for being constantly on call to make our mission a success. Speaking of the ears, we use eardrops after every dive to control outer ear infections ("swimmer's ear"). We are each issued our own bottle of a special concoction as soon as we show up for training. Suni and I noticed we each had a little bit of burning after using it last night, and got instantly upgraded to more potent stuff. The doc today said both of my ears look fine, so that's good. The alternative would be to start losing dive days if a problem like that got really bad. Getting "beached" in Aquarius could be a real drag.

After lunch I was sitting by the main view port at the kitchen table working on my journal. Ryan and I noticed how much "stuff" was floating by in the water. If you just strained a square meter of seawater you'd be amazed at all the living things you could capture. All of a sudden we noticed a "shimmering" in the water, typical of a thermocline (where the temperature changes suddenly.) That was pretty cool to see. The visibility also dropped significantly. People have sometimes joked "what's the weather like down there? Same as yesterday?!" Actually, no. I had no understanding of this before the mission, but I've come to realize that the "weather" day by day in the ocean can fluctuate quite a bit. The sea states are constantly changing, which is the kind of obvious part, but so are many other things. For starters, the currents are constantly changing directions and temperature. The visibility is different every day. There are sometimes "upwelling" events, where cold water from the deeper sea comes up to this level. It is very rich in nutrients, noticeably colder, and brings bad visibility. They say you can sometimes see these coming just like a Southeastern New Mexico dust storm. I've developed a theory that our poor understanding of the currents and "weather" inside the ocean is a major contributor to the fact that we can't predict the weather accurately on land more than three days out. Our water sampling experiment is an attempt to capture and quantify the chemistry of this much more nutrient rich water that comes from the deeper ocean during upwelling events.

The afternoon dive, which lasted about two hours to about 70 feet deep, was out to the Pinnacle again. As we set off down the line, I really large Spotted Eagle Ray swam in formation with us for a little way, about 15 feet away. The Pinnacle is really interesting because the terrain resembles being in the hills. At times the excursion line is 20 or so feet off the bottom. Mike and I developed a great rhythm on tagging the line, and tagged about 300 feet, every 25 feet, in about 30 minutes. We spent our whole dive trying to measure the quality of the comm units with our MCC back in Houston, and had a challenging swim back to Aquarius when we started to run out of time. I couldn't believe how strong the current was - we were really working hard trying to get back with the current in our faces. How was the weather today? Fair this morning, but a cold front blew in around noon and it was windy and cold all afternoon...

Tonight we are watching U-575 on DVD - a movie about a German U-boat submarine. I've seen this before, so I'm working on the journal instead. Something about being 50 feet underwater and watching a movie about a submarine sinking doesn't seem quite right to me. [Editors Note: You'll love The Abyss.] Mike is doing such a great job of commanding our team. He is keeping us on track with our tasks, keeping the communication flowing, and keeping spirits high in general with things like the movie and tattoo day. My respect for him continues to grow.

If you have time or interest, the USA Today article is below:

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020515/4112303s.htm

The Quest website, which should have an archived copy of the webcast is at:

http://www.quest.arc.nasa.gov/projects/space/aquarius/2002/index.html

Well, that's all for mission day 3. Out from Aquarius.