Otherwise, life has all been work lately.

In case you are wondering what's going to keep me really busy at work this week, I am now going to venture off into technobabble about NEEMO...

I woke up at 0'dark'thirty to begin my work on NEEMO 6. Up until now, the work has been interesting, or at the very least productive. But after this morning's teleconference with the crew (already living underwater off the coast of Key Largo) I am totally stoked about it!

The point of NEEMO is that some astronauts and engineers go and live in this enviornment with is "analog" to a space mission -- and we can test out new technologies and new ways of communication while keeping the crew just a little bit closer to home. For this mission, they are "aquanauts" instead of astronauts. Anyway, I am working in the ExPOC, which is an experimental Mission Control room where three controllers keep in touch with the aquanauts to help them during their dives (called "EVA's", or Extravehicular Activity -- just like space walking). I am working a position called "Data", which keeps track of where the crew is and how much air they are consuming and what progress they are making in the mission. I helped write a tool that will display the position of the crew and their status on a big screen for all the other ExPOC people to look at, and part of my job as "Data" is to keep it updated real-time.

As a side note, in several copies of mission reports there is a note that says "Make sure to tell Becca that there is flourishing fauna and coral on the 'Becca North' and 'Becca South' lines." I think I mentioned before that there were two excursion lines that didn't have names and we were having a brain fart about what to call them -- so I JOKED that we should name them after ourselves. JOKED. You know that casual snide comment that I occasionally will make when meetings get boring and/or slow. Much to my embarrassment, it stuck. But I guess I'm over the embarrasment, and starting to think its just damn cool that there are these random underwater ropes with my name! Of course, I always joked I wanted to invent my own equation just to have an equation named after me... so, I guess this is a trial run :)!

So, if you are interested in following the mission, there are live web cams that you can watch here. They do dives twice a day, in the morning and afternoon - so if you want to see the crew in action, you know where to go.

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