by KYW's Michelle Durham
Astronauts have to understand how to work in zero-gravity conditions. But finding a suitable training environment on Earth is a tall order.
NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab gives astronauts the experience they need to work in space. It's one of the largest indoor pools in the world, and the water provides the illusion that one is floating in space.
This underwater lab is known as the NBL. It's two football fields long, 40 feet deep, and contains 6.2 million gallons of water -- heated to 86 degrees.
Astronauts in spacesuits slowly descend to work under water for two hours at a time, all the while being monitored by more than 30 cameras.
Greg Simms (right) works in the NBL and explains the role of test director:
"He's in charge of making sure the pressure in the suits are good. We'll get them to the bottom of the pool. The safety divers will weigh them out -- just like the weightlessness in space -- and then we'll turn it over to the test conductor, which is just like Mission Control.
"They'll go out and meet their objectives for the day. And as you can see, we have got the complete space station under water."
Simms says astronauts spend a lot of time here:
"For every hour they go EVA (extra vehicular activity) in space, we train them about 10 hours under water. So by the time they fly, they've got several hundreds of hours of training. By the time they get up there, they know just a little bit about what they are doing."
(Photos #1 and #2 by KYW's Michelle Durham)
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