First Female NASA Astronaut to Walk in Space Becomes First Woman to Reach Deepest Point in Earth's Oceans

New York, June 09: Former NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan who was the first American woman to walk in space scripted history after becoming the 8th person and the first woman to reach the lowest depths of the Earth called Challenger Deep located at the southern end of the Mariana Trench.

 

On Sunday, former Kathy Sullivan reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, over 35,000 feet below the sea level of the Pacific Ocean. Challenger Deep is considered the deepest point in Earth's oceans and resides within the Mariana Trench, a mighty, sickle-shaped depression lying about 1,100 miles east of the Philippines. The pressure at the bottom is over 1,000 times the pressure at sea level.

 

 

This also makes Sullivan the first person to both walk-in space and to descend to the deepest point in the ocean. The Challenger Deep is the lowest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. Sullivan and Victor L. Vescovo, an explorer funding the mission, spent about an hour and a half at their destination, nearly 7 miles down in a muddy depression in the Mariana Trench, which is about 200 miles southwest of Guam.

 

 

They utilized a specially-designed deep-sea research submersible known as the Limiting Factor to capture photos from the trip. It was a four-hour ascent back into the norm. After capturing images from the Limiting Factor, a specially designed deep-sea research submersible, they began the roughly four-hour ascent. Upon returning to their ship, the pair called a group of astronauts aboard the International Space Station, around 254 miles above Earth.

 

“As a hybrid oceanographer and astronaut this was an extraordinary day, a once in a lifetime day, seeing the moonscape of the Challenger Deep and then comparing notes with my colleagues on the ISS about our remarkable reusable inner-space outer-spacecraft,” Dr. Sullivan said in a statement released by EYOS Expeditions on Monday.

 

Last year, Vescovo became the fourth person in history to reach Challenger Deep as part of his Five Deeps expedition. He expressed pleasure to have Dr. Sullivan as an oceanographer during the dive, and then as an astronaut to talk to the ISS. Vescovo, who dived for the third time to reach Challenger Deep, took to Twitter to congratulate Dr. Sullivan for accomplishing the historic record.

 

In 1978, Dr. Sullivan joined NASA as part of the first group of U.S. astronauts to include women. On Oct. 11, 1984, she became the first American woman to walk in space.

 

EYOS Expeditions expedition leader Rob McCallum said in a statement that it was amazing to set up a conversation between two “spacecraft”. He added that the exploration highlighted the vast span of human endeavor while at the same time linking us close together as fellow explorers.