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Journal 21 - Greg
Chamitoff: Mission Day 4: Thursday, July 18, 2002 It suddenly occurred to me today, as Danny and I dragged ourselves for 400 feet along a line against a very strong current that I never even glanced at the surface today. Not once, and I was outside for almost 5 hours. Approaching each marker on the line, we could barely see the next one only 25 feet away. It was like driving on a windy mountain road at night in dense fog, where your only reference to anything would be a few dashes of the yellow line on the road ahead. Then, finally, this shadow of a structure began to appear. We were getting close to home. Somehow, sometime, in the past few days, I made a shift to thinking of this world as being disconnected from the world above. There is light from above, but the visibility hasn't been good enough to notice the exact direction that it's coming from. We've been busy, and at times you almost forget that your mask and regulator are there. While this environment is "hostile" for humans from a life-support perspective, it has other advantageous qualities that you quickly learn to utilize. Like the zero-G environment on the Space Station or Shuttle, you can move in any direction, hover anywhere and in any orientation. Of course, all divers experience this and really enjoy it, but for accomplishing tasks it is a powerful tool. After a few days of this, you begin to think more three-dimensionally, and look for ways to capitalize on this environmental advantage. For the past two days we've been working with a construction experiment that is somewhat similar to construction tasks that we perform during space-walks outside the Space Station. If you could see the sequence, I think it would be obvious that our level of 3D thinking and operating increased as we went along. By the end, we were operating naturally in all dimensions and the concept of up or down made no difference. In Space, this is true, of course, both inside and outside the spacecraft. There's nothing hostile about it at all, it's a great convenience, and humans adapt to this aspect of the environment very quickly. Today, Danny and I explored the S4 (named after a piece of oceanographic equipment deployed along the line) and 5th Leg, two less-traveled excursion lines that lead directly toward deeper water. Our objective there was to quantify the range and effectiveness of the new underwater communication units. The connection was supposed to go all the way back to Mission Control in Houston, but unfortunately there were some surface-related comm problems. That really would have been amazing - speaking to Houston while 90 feet down on a reef system in Florida. Hopefully we'll get another try. But we did characterize the system's performance back to Aquarius, and it works really well. Being able to communicate underwater adds a huge additional dimension of coordination capability between divers and the base. This is similar to EVAs in Space, where there is communication between the EVA crewmembers, the onboard crew members, and mission control on the ground. In addition, NASA now has helmet mounted cameras for our EVA spacesuits, so anyone in the world can see what's happening from the astronaut's point-of-view, while watching the TV in their own living room. These are essential tools for getting work done efficiently in an extreme environment. They're a lot of fun to use too! One of the highlights of today for me was that a Diet Coke magically appeared in our cold box. Our topside team made some deliveries, and we each got a soda of our choice. My biggest sacrifice for this trip was going to be not having Diet Coke for 9 days. But I guess that Mission Control is happy with us and decided to launch a care package! Now I can hold out for at least another week! |
Mission
Date: July, 2002 Mission Summary Aquanaut Profiles Expedition Journals Mission Pictures |
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