The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) is an

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally r ...

training facility and

neutral buoyancy pool A neutral buoyancy pool or neutral buoyancy tank is a pool of water in which neutral buoyancy is used to train astronauts for extravehicular activity and the development of procedures. These pools began to be used in the 1960s and were initially ...

operated by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

and located at the

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Training Facility, near the

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. The NBL's main feature is a large indoor pool of water, in which astronauts may perform simulated

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tasks in preparation for upcoming missions. Trainees wear suits designed to provide

neutral buoyancy Neutral buoyancy occurs when an object's average density is equal to the density of the fluid in which it is immersed, resulting in the buoyant force balancing the force of gravity that would otherwise cause the object to sink (if the body's dens ...

to simulate the

microgravity The term micro-g environment (also μg, often referred to by the term microgravity) is more or less synonymous with the terms ''weightlessness'' and ''zero-g'', but emphasising that g-forces are never exactly zero—just very small (on the I ...

that astronauts would experience during

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History

In the late 1980s NASA began to consider replacing its previous neutral-buoyancy training facility, the Weightless Environment Training Facility (WETF). The WETF, located at Johnson Space Center, had been successfully used to train astronauts for numerous missions, but its pool was too small to hold useful mock-ups of space station components of the sorts intended for the mooted Space Station ''Freedom'', or its successor, the International Space Station. This new pool was going to be on Johnson Space Center property and was planned to be by , with a depth of . To save money it was downsized and placed inside an existing structure. NASA purchased the structure that now holds the NBL from

McDonnell Douglas McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produ ...

in the early 1990s and began refitting it as a neutral-buoyancy training center in 1995. File:NASA Commercialization Training Camp and NFL 3.jpg, The tank includes mock-ups of International Space Station modules and other training materials Image:NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory control area.jpg, Simulation control area

Facility features

The diving tank is in length, wide, and deep, and contains of water. The NBL contains full-scale mock-ups of

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ...

(ISS) modules and payloads, as well as visiting vehicles such as the

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(JAXA) HTV, the

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ATV, the

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, and the

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Cygnus. Full-scale mock-ups of equipment such as the

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payload bay and Hubble Space Telescope have been removed, as they are no longer needed for training. The facility contains a hyperbaric chamber for treating any dive related emergencies, as well as an altitude chamber to simulate physiological effects of flying.

References

{{coord, 29.6071, -95.1439, region:US-TX_type:landmark, display=title Neutral buoyancy pools Johnson Space Center 1995 establishments in Texas

History

Facility features

See also

References