The 12th mission of NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) has started 2 days ago, and will continue until next week. The main goal of the mission is the test of two remotely-controlled surgical robots, Raven from the University of Washington and the M-7 from SRI International:

The mission takes place in the Aquarius, a 45-foot-long, 13-foot-diameter habitat that rests 62 feet underwater off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. The crew will live underwater for 12 days, conducting various experiments.

“In addition to hands on telesurgery demonstrations, robotic telesurgery technology developed and refined within this mission will help surgeons overcome interplanetary communication lag time. Technologies such as surgeon-guided automatic robot function could improve the care of astronauts on future lunar missions.”

There is nice image gallery and the progress of the mission can be followed on a day-to-day basis on this blog.