A Sewage-Proof Suit

Diesel oil and raw sewage slowly trickled into Taber MacCallum’s eyes as he swam toward the sunken research ship he’d been called to help salvage. It was 1989, and Hurricane Hugo had devastated Puerto Rico three days before, dumping fuel and municipal waste into San Juan Harbor. As the young diver and analytical chemist worked to raise the ship, the seals on his diving equipment disintegrated in the muck that crept into his helmet. Every time MacCallum exhaled into the putrid water, his helmet let a few drops back in.

Most contaminated-water diving is done by military and professional divers either as part of routine inspections or just after tanker explosions, natural disasters and pipeline breaks. “It can be hard to determine if a body of water is contaminated just by looking at it,” explains Phil Newsum, a former commercial diver who now heads the Association of Diving Contractors International. “But those pollutants will come right into your helmet.”

In 2001, shortly after sending its divers into diesel-fouled waters to repair the USS Cole, the U.S. Navy put out a request for a company to help it develop diving equipment designed specifically for contaminated water. MacCallum jumped at the opportunity. After two years living in the sealed environment of Biosphere 2, he had founded a company to design life-support systems for extreme environments. His latest project was researching a new space suit for NASA. And he’d never forgotten his San Juan dive.

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Phoenix Mars Lander Phones Home, Prepares to Unfold Arm

After a communications hiccup, mission control orders Phoenix to limber up its robotic arm

NASA researchers instructed the Phoenix Mars Lander perched near the Red Planet’s north pole to unstow its 7.7-foot (2.3-meter) robotic arm in preparation for collecting samples of subsurface ice surrounding the probe, the space agency announced today. Phoenix operators were forced to delay deployment of the arm by one day when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which had been relaying transmissions between Phoenix and Earth since the craft landed Sunday, switched off communications unexpectedly.

Phoenix executed preprogrammed backup commands to keep taking photos and monitor the local weather, which MRO relayed to mission controllers yesterday evening after transmissions were reestablished, the agency said.

Unstowing the arm consists of “a series of seven moves, beginning with rotating its wrist to release the forearm from its launch restraint,” robotic arm manager Bob Bonitz of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. “Another series of moves releases the elbow from its launch restraints and moves the elbow from underneath the biobarrier.”

Images sent back Monday showed that the elbow joint was still partially wrapped in a protective sheath that was supposed to peel off after landing.

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