Steven Squyres

摘要

This week you will be travelling underwater off the coast of Florida as part of NASA's NEEMO undersea exploration mission. Why? In 2025 NASA wants to send humans to explore asteroids a kilometre in size or smaller. These are effectively rrticrogravity environments. As nobody knows how to do field geology in microgravity, the best way to simulate it is underwater. This is quite a change from your usual Job, managing NASA's Mars rovers. I have been saying publicly for years that I am a big supporter of human space flight. This is the chance for me to stop talking about it and actually do something towards it. How big is the underwater laboratory you will be working in? It's about the size of a school bus, and it sits on the seabed at a depth of 19 metres. There will be six of us there - four NASA crew members and two folks from the National Undersea Research Center.