James Cameron Begins Descent to Ocean's Deepest Point (Click to read the National Geographic News article)

SciFi Question of the Day: How can exploring the depths of the ocean prepare us for exploring space?

Facebook Answers:

  Amanda Prinsloo Decompression factors.

   Daniel Beard how to get 200 people living together in a small pipe for months without killing each other. or winding up in an “I Love Me” coat.

  Brian Covault  I was reading on the NASA web site that one of the holy grails of flagship space exploration missions is exporing the bottom of the ocean of Europa. Extremely difficult mission – have to get to Europa, drill through miles ice and then freely navigate the ocean below all by remote control. I’d guess part of feasibility testing for that would be so see if the same thing could be done here in the ocean below antarctic ice.

Google Plus Answers:

  Brent Stires  –  buzzkill: it probably can’t

  Jacqueline Lichtenberg  –  Actually, the contained environment tricks are very useful. Also there’s no guarantee other planets have any dry land. If we want to explore, we have to be amphibious.

  Brent Stires  –  +Jacqueline Lichtenberg gotta get there first

different pressure underwater and in space. completely different types of vehicles.

contained environment tricks yes.

  Jacqueline Lichtenberg  –  Oh, yes, none of this stuff is easy or one-step.

  michael interbartolo  –  closed loop life support (like ISS or any spacecraft), lack of solar power (just like deep space, once you get past Mars solar arrays don’t work so well), remote operations (whether it is driving rover on Mars or fixing a deep sea oil rig spill how much is autonomous vs telepresence) isolation and psychological effects of being spam in a can.

  AmyBeth Inverness  –  I think one of the NASA twitter feeds I follow is something under the ocean…

  michael interbartolo  –  yes NEEMO is our underwater lab off the coast of Florida. we practice spacewalks, close quarters living, remote operations and other tasks.

  AmyBeth Inverness  –  Oh yes! The second best acronym, next to OOREO!

  michael interbartolo  –  OREO is the OMS RCS Engine Officer for Shuttle

  AmyBeth Inverness  –  It is also a nummy cookie

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I would love to hear what you think! Even if you are reading this post a year or more after publishing, I hope you will leave a comment with your own ideas on this topic.