Astronauts in Seatest underwater adventure
01 October 2013
ESA astronauts Andreas Mogensen and Thomas Pesquet recently returned from Florida after taking part in Seatest – a crew training exercise held on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Andreas spent four nights in the Aquarius habitat, together with Joa Acaba and Kate Rubins from NASA, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. They were also joined by Paxi, the ESA Kids mascot, who had sneaked out of a meeting in Scotland to visit his friend Andreas! Up above, Thomas took on the role of flight director and crew communicator.
Learning how to live and work in space is not easy. Missions such as Seatest offer valuable opportunities to try out new tools and methods that might be used in space, and to practise spacewalks 20 m under water. They also help astronauts from different countries learn how to communicate and work as a team.
Each day, two of the Seatest crew went outside for a three-hour ‘waterwalk’, while the other two astronauts monitored their progress from inside Aquarius. In the afternoon the roles were reversed. During these exercises, they practised moving across different terrains and testing new ways of sampling the sea bed. They tested a modified ‘pooper-scooper’ and an advanced drill that can cut safely into solid rock.
On the third day of their mission, the waterwalkers changed their attached weights to recreate gravity on the Moon, where everything weighs one sixth of what it does on Earth. “The lunar spacewalks were the best,” said Andreas. “It is a fantastic feeling to bounce around on the surface.”
Inside Aquarius, Andreas and his colleagues assembled and tested a small, computer-controlled, exercise device. Meanwhile, above ground, Thomas learned how to deal with a 20-minute delay imposed on all communications between the astronauts and mission control – a problem that will one day be faced on a human voyage to Mars or an asteroid.
