Sixty feet beneath the waves off the Florida Keys, NASA on Monday will take some of its first tentative steps toward sending humans to an asteroid.
In addition to building a spacecraft and a booster rocket, the space agency also needs to develop new tools and methods if it is to successfully land astronauts on a large hunk of rock with virtually no gravity.
To that end, a crew of three “aquanauts” and a scientist will begin a 13-day mission Monday on the sea floor near Key Largo to begin developing the equipment and operations that would be used for an asteroid mission.
“We're not practicing asteroid exploration,” said Steve Squyres, the principal scientist behind the Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers, who is part of the expedition. “What we're going to be doing is taking the first steps toward learning how to do asteroid exploration with humans.”
The crew will spend nearly two weeks living inside the school-bus sized Aquarius lab in the Conch Reef of the Florida Keys and working outside.
Although it is a NOAA lab, NASA has used the facility 14 times during the last decade as a proxy for space exploration.
“What Aquarius offers you, aside from the experience of living in close quarters like in a long-duration mission, is the ability to work in a weightless environment,” said astronaut Shannon Walker, who will lead the mission. “Once we go outside, we can weigh ourselves out to be neutrally buoyant.”
The Johnson Space Center has a large swimming pool at its Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in which astronauts can practice space walks, but the Aquarius offers the ability to do that on a larger scale.
One of the biggest challenges of working on an asteroid will be the lack of gravity. Astronauts can hold a handrail while working outside the International Space Station, but those will not exist on an asteroid.
Using submersibles and other tools, Walker and the other aquanauts — as astronauts are called when they visit the underwater facility — will try to determine the best way to stabilize themselves on or adjacent to an asteroid's surface.
“We want to know the best way to efficiently work and conduct science at an asteroid,” Walker said.
NASA does not yet have the spacecraft, rockets or technology needed to fly humans to its ultimate destination, Mars. In the interim, the space agency is focusing on more doable missions.
To that end, it is building the Orion spacecraft and a heavy-lift rocket needed to launch enough food, water, fuel and other supplies for a six-month mission to fly to and from a nearby asteroid in a decade or so.
The space agency hopes that by conducting such flights to an asteroid transiting near Earth's orbit, and perhaps the small moons of Mars, it can learn enough about deep-space travel to send humans to Mars within a few decades.
For now, at least, some of the first steps will have to be taken in the clear waters off the Florida Keys.
