• 
• 

Flight of the Aquanaut / subject background

The Newtsuit

The Aquanaut travels inside a NEWTSUIT, a state-of–the-art diving suit that allows its wearer to dive as deep as 1,000 feet while staying at atmospheric pressure and retaining much of normal mobility. Its one atmosphere environment eliminates the pressure -related physiological hazards that have always hampered (and all too often killed) unprotected divers operating in deep water.

The NEWTSUIT is an atmospheric diving suit or 'ADS'. Doing extended work in deep water without a suit or a submarine involves 'saturation diving', a process in which divers allow their body tissues to become 'saturated' with nitrogen. Diving in deep water exposes divers to such physiological hazards as 'the bends', nitrogen narcosis, high-pressure nervous syndrome and bone necrosis. A diving suit which maintains a low internal pressure protects its wearer against such pressure-related hazards.

In addition to the inherent dangers of saturation diving, the process is also long and expensive: a dive of twelve hours duration for example, will be preceded by a day of compression and followed by eight days of decompression in a large hyperbaric chamber. With the right suit, saturation diving no longer becomes necessary.