Imagine yourself hip-to-hip, shoulder-to-shoulder, inside a room the size of a walk-in closet for eight hours with five people you just met. Does that make you sweat? Or maybe make your breathing a little more animated?
For three weeks, 23 volunteers dedicated time to do just that -- sweat and breathe -- inside a test chamber so NASA scientists at Johnson Space Center in Houston could measure the amount of moisture and carbon dioxide absorbed by a new system being developed for future space vehicles. The system is designed to control carbon dioxide and humidity inside a crew capsule to make air breathable and living space more comfortable.
The tests, which took place from April 14 to May 1, are some of the first to use human subjects in support of NASA's Orion crew capsule, Altair lunar lander and lunar rovers.
Known as the Carbon-dioxide and Moisture Removal Amine Swing-bed, or CAMRAS, the Exploration Life Support project within NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program is developing the new system. The program is investigating technologies that will help sustain life on exploration vehicles and reduce the dependence on resupply from Earth.
Testing on the device began more than a year ago with machines used to create humidity and carbon dioxide in the test chamber. The tests proved the system worked well, but the machines could not generate the wide variety of metabolic loads -- amounts of energy the body's chemical reactions produce to maintain life -- that humans create.
This series of tests put volunteers inside a test chamber scaled to be the size of the Orion crew capsule, about 570 cubic feet. The volunteers, who were selected and grouped to replicate a typical crew, were asked to sleep, eat and exercise during test sessions that lasted from a few hours to overnight.
Two additional phases of testing on CAMRAS are planned.
The CAMRAS absorption beds are regenerated by the vacuum of space, and processing the carbon dioxide and moisture requires little energy. CAMRAS uses an organic compound known as amine that absorbs the carbon dioxide and water vapor from the cabin's atmosphere. The system then vents the two waste products overboard, and the vacuum of space regenerates the amine to work again.
The Exploration Life Support project also is developing technologies that will recover oxygen and water vapor, recycle spacecraft wastewater into drinking water and recover usable resources from wastes.
Video of the final test will be available on NASA Television's Video File. For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ultrafast laser that offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power. The same NIST group also has shown that this type of laser, when used as a frequency comb—an ultraprecise technique for measuring different colors of light—could boost the sensitivity of astronomical tools searching for other Earthlike planets as much as 100 fold.
After safely reaching its launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, space shuttle Discovery now awaits its next major milestone for the upcoming STS-124 mission. A launch dress rehearsal, known as the terminal countdown demonstration test, is scheduled to take place at Kennedy from May 6 to 9.
Discovery arrived at the pad at 4:25 a.m. EDT Saturday on top of a giant crawler-transporter. The crawler-transporter left Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building at 11:47 p.m. Friday, traveling less than 1 mph during the 3.4-mile journey. The shuttle was secured on the launch pad at 6:06 a.m. Saturday.