宇航員太空旅行做水下實驗

　　7月31日VOA聽力：宇航員為太空旅遊做水下試驗

　　Manned deep space missions are still a long wayoff, but space agencies are already testingprocedures, equipment and human stamina foroperations in extreme environment conditions.Small groups of astronauts take turns inspending days in an underwater lab, offFlorida’s southern coast, simulating future missions to some remote world.

　　Looking ahead to planned missions to the moon, an asteroid and Mars, Western space agenciessend their astronauts to this underwater lab, 20 meters below the surface, off the coast of KeyLargo, Florida, to test procedures, equipment and how to tolerate living with each other in aconfined space.

　　“Obviously, you need people that are willing to adjust, that are easygoing, that are ready tolead but also follow, and so you need a good balance of people in order to run a place like this,to run a mission smoothly," said Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano.

　　European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, NASA astronauts Serena Aunon and DavidCoan, and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai are the 20th crew of the NASA ExtremeEnvironment Mission Operations, a program known as NEEMO.

　　A large surface support crew, plus two experienced divers living with them in the lab, help theastronauts train for different environments.

　　“Outside, here, in the ocean, we can use our buoyancy control devices to create very specificconditions where we can be fully microgravity or in reduced gravity and simulate being on thesurface of a planet or on an asteroid or on a moon," said Parmitano.

　　Much of their time is devoted to testing new procedures.

　　“We also implemented an artificial time delay so that all our communications are artificiallydelayed to study what would happen if we are on the surface of Mars and we cannot have adirect answer instantaneously," Parmitano said.

　　Sometimes the tools developed for space do not work well underwater.

　　“We are trying to utilize our developing tools for our real scientific research but sometimes itdoesn't work well in the water, so in this case we have to use just normal tools which marinescientists use for collecting samples," said Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai.

　　The samples are collected for the owner of the underwater lab, Florida International University,whose scientists are going to use them in their own studies.

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