NEEMO 7 Dr. Michael DeBakey (seated) and Canadian astronaut Dafydd Williams observe remote telesurgery experiments from Johnson Space Center. RELATED LINKS NEEMO 7 Journals

NEEMO 7 Journals

NEEMO 7, Topside Team
Day 9, October 19, 2004

Greetings!

One of the things we who work on the NEEMO team take great pride in is the dedication with which we support educational outreach. Over the course of this mission we've supported 7 different events, most of which had a handful of schools involved. Two of the events were streamed live to the internet. The students ranged from grade school to medical students, and spanned from Alaska to Florida, California to New Jersey, and, of course, across Canada as well. As an example, for one of these events Bob participated in an Ontario medical student conference that was taking place at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Over 400 medical students from 5 Ontario medical schools were gathered at Queens University for a conference on “Medicine in Unusual Environments”. The session entitled “Telementoring: Skills development for the next generation of aerospace medicine professionals” involved a videoconference link-up between the students, Bob in the habitat and Dr. Anvari in Hamilton. Dave Williams was the moderator at Queens University. The event was very successful and ended with a standing ovation from the students. We're excited to be involved in an effort that can use events like this to educate the next generation of students of the beauty and fragility of the oceans, as well as some of the work NASA and NOAA do.

On the flip side, missions like this tend to generate a lot of media interest. Doing "Public Affairs Office," or PAO events is a standard part of a NEEMO mission as well. Like Educational Outreach events, these are great training for our astronauts because they will be doing lots of these on their future space missions. And they're real. Whatever was said or done will be out there for the world to see! This mission has generated the usual interest in the U.S. (Space.com and CNN to name a couple), as well as a long list of Canadian media (Hamilton Magazine/Canadian Medical Association, the Calgary Herald, the Canadian Press, LaPresse, and CBC.) A Google search just now on "NEEMO 7" yielded 9,480 hits!

On a side note, the " Topside" team would like to recognize Mike for its first " Heros of Waterlab" award. Mike made the following observations in his latest journal : "It is truly moving how much pride a group of whacko type A perfectionists can take in a rickety lattice of PVC pipe! She looks good out there on the sea floor, as good as any platform NASA has ever built. Pirate flag notwithstanding."

... That's the spirit, Mike!