Why were NASA exploring the ocean?
NASA has run numerous ocean exploration programs that concern the ocean worlds found on Mars and other moons.
Thanks to a combination of impossibly deep waters, immense pressure, and a lack of sunlight – over 80 per cent of the total oceans on Earth are a total mystery.
And two NASA ESSP missions have set out to uncover these mysteries – these include the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and the Aquarius mission.
GRACE, which launched on March 17, 2002, was designed to explore hitherto undetectable variations in the mass field of the ocean – which is important for climate and ocean circulation studies.
The Aquarius mission, which was launched on June 10, 2011, was set up to explore the salinity of the ocean from space – known as NEEMO, groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists are sent to live in Aquarius.
The Aquarius is the world’s only undersea research station and researchers are sent there for up to three weeks at a time.
Aquarius scientists worked to understand the changing ocean and the condition of coral reefs – which are threatened locally, regionally and globally by increasing amounts of pollution, over-harvesting of fisheries, disease and climate change.
Explorations of the ocean carried out by NASA have led to knowledge and technology that is now widely used in research and application.
Examples of this initiative include – ocean surface topography as measured by precision altimeters, ocean vector winds as measured by scatterometers, and ocean colour as measured by radiometers.
What did NASA find in the ocean?
Aquarius provided essential ocean surface salinity data needed to link the water cycle and ocean circulation-two major components of the climate system.
The mission also discovered that inhabitants of Aquarius, known as “aquanauts,” could stay indefinitely and have nearly unlimited bottom time during their scuba dives from Aquarius.
At the end of a mission, aquanauts undergo a 17-hour decompression that is conducted within Aquarius itself, while on the bottom.
At the end of decompression, aquanauts exited Aquarius and scuba-dived back to the surface.
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