Where Coral and the Cosmos Collided
The NASA NEEMO program (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) used to run annual astronaut training missions in the Florida Keys at the Aquarius underwater habitat located in 60’ of water off Conch Reef. The Aquarius, sometimes referred to as Aquarius Reef Base, is an underwater habitat originally named the George F Bond and deployed in 1986 off St John in the US Virgin Islands. The habitat and supporting infrastructure was damaged by hurricane Hugo in 1989, so the habitat itself was eventually removed and brought back the United States for repair. In 1993 it was renamed “Aquarius” and redeployed at Conch Reef off Key Largo in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary as part of the National Undersea Research Program, a NOAA funded and managed program. The Aquarius program in the Keys was then managed by the National Undersea Research Center at University of North Carolina, Wilmington from 1993 until about 2012 when NOAA discontinued funding the program. After about a year of inactivity, the program was reopened as the Medina Aquarius Program, funded primarily by a grant from George Medina and managed by Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. The Aquarius ceased operations during the Covid period and did not resume mission operations following the lengthy Covid closure. Its future is uncertain due to the high costs of running the program and the age of the habitat itself.
The Aquarius was open to scientists and researchers and supported 4-6 missions each year, mostly in the spring, summer, and fall. Beginning in 2001 NASA ran astronaut training missions in the Aquarius as part of the NEEMO training program. Each year, usually in July or August, a team of NASA specialists, NASA contractors, and astronauts from around the world would travel to Key Largo to conduct underwater training missions to prepare astronauts for the challenges of working in space suits in confined spaces and challenging environments. The NEEMO training team, led by Bill Todd and Marc Reagan, would develop a whole suite of tasks for the astronauts to perform during each mission. Some of the tasks would be conducted inside the habitat, and some would be conducted outside the habitat, and each year the mission tasks would change.
In the winter of 2016, several months before the NEEMO 21 mission scheduled for July of 2016, Bill Todd, NEEMO Project manager, and Roger Garcia, Aquarius Operations manager, met with Reef Renewal USA’s Ken Nedimyer (president of the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF) at the time) to explore the idea of creating some coral related tasks for the next training mission. They decided to create a set of tasks that would lead to the astronauts building an underwater coral nursery adjacent to the Aquarius and stocking it with corals. Because the project was being managed by FIU, their coral research biologists developed a project to study changes in the microbiome of the corals being moved to the deep water environment and compare them to an identical set of corals that remained at the nearby CRF nursery.
Under normal circumstances building an underwater coral nursery is a challenging exercise for experienced divers using SCUBA, but for this mission the “divers” would be astronauts operating in hardhat equipment with umbilical cables running back to the Aquarius, so mobility would be limited and familiarity with the corals and equipment would be non-existent. Many of the materials normally used to assemble nursery structures, such as adhesives, could not be used in the habitat and could not be mixed by the astronauts wearing heavy gloves and hard hats, so Ken had to develop a completely new nursery design and nursery structure that would accommodate the limitations of the team.
As the coral nursery project was developed over a six month period, the NEEMO team had to work out other aspects of the project and incorporate them into an overall daily schedule for the astronauts. As the mission start date approached, Ken and the FIU team mounted and sampled all the corals that would be used for the project, and Ken worked on refining the final nursery design. The NASA team, the astronauts, and the supporting contractors arrived the week before the mission and the hands on training for the mission began. During that training week, in between the in-water training sessions, Ken and other contractors spent time training the astronauts turned aquanauts on the individual tasks they would be doing during the mission. Ken and other volunteer divers also spent time that week getting all the materials in place at the Aquarius so that everything would be set and ready once the mission had begun.
The 16 day mission began on July 21st, 2016, and was divided into two 8 day submissions that involved a change of a couple team members halfway through the mission. The Coral nursery work was done during the first half of the mission and was performed by NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Megan McArthur Behnken, European Space Agency Astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Dr. Marc O’Griofa from Teloregen/VEGA/Airdocs. The aquanauts were supported by FIU Technicians Hank Stark and Sean Moore.
During the coral nursery construction and stocking parts of the mission, Ken Nedimyer was on site at the surface but was not allowed to participate in the dives due to safety concerns for the aquanaut team members. The aquanauts were able to successfully set up two nurseries, one in 55’ of water and one in 90’ of water and Ken and a team of Nitrox certified volunteers were able to monitor the corals over the next year. Unfortunately, the nurseries were destroyed in September 2017 by hurricane Irma and Ken left CRF at the end of the year, so no further work was done at either of these deep water nursery sites.
For more information about the NEEMO 21 mission, take a look at these following videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59yg867Ml58
https://www.ihmc.us/n21-crew-training-begins/
NEEMO 21 Crew
- Reid Wiseman, NASA Astronaut
- Megan McArthur, NASA Astronaut
- Matthias Maurer, ESA Astronaut
- Marc O Griofa, Teloregen/VEGA/Air Docs
- Dawn Kernagis, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
- Noel Du Toit, Naval Postgraduate Schol
- Hank Stark, FIU Habitat Tech
- Sean Moore, FIU habitat Tech
