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JASON project links local kids to the world's oceans

By Steve Enders

The eyes of 11-year-old Austin Hill and his friend Yun Fei Zong are about as big as the three video screens that are lit up with live images from around the world.

Fish swim by on one screen, kelp drifts lazily on another. As the broadcast begins, the picture on the center screen jumps from a group of kids in England to another group in Denver, Colo., who all shout, "Hello!"

A collective "whoa, cool," comes from the audience of excited schoolchildren that fills the auditorium at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Hill and Zong, who are from Bishop Elementary School, are here with their teachers for the JASON project, a fully interactive experience that, this time, is taking them to explore life on the bottom of two of the world's oceans.

The center and largest screen now shows a live picture from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where acclaimed oceanographer Robert Ballard talks to the thousands of students around the world who are watching the broadcast.

The screen shifts to another live picture of a diver in Bermuda, who is examining the coral reef, explaining its structure to the students. The reef is visible on the screen to the left of center.

Their explanations are in relatively simple terms so that everyone can understand them, but the scientists don't patronize their audience. The kids are expected to know a little bit about science, although the entire exercise is geared to expose them to more.

The auditorium at Ames serves as a Primary Interactive Network Site (PINS), as do the other PINS in Denver, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., and England.

The PINS are equipped with cameras, Internet connections and an array of satellite receivers and video monitors. Through the cameras and the Internet, the students can ask questions of the divers or Ballard, who stands on the observation deck of the aquarium.

The technology is very sophisticated, and the production is polished, despite some satellite interference. The divers can see what the kids see on the screens in Mountain View through tiny monitors mounted on their helmets. They can also communicate with the students and have small cameras near the monitors so they can share what they're seeing.

After the hour-long broadcast, the kids answer questions posed by a very active moderator, Lisa Marie Gonzales. Gonzales bounces around the auditorium with a microphone, making sure that the students are listening and comprehend what they are hearing.

The two students from Sunnyvale's Bishop Elementary School are just a few of the 13,000 Bay Area kids participating in the innovative two-week program at NASA Ames.

After the broadcast, the kids invade the main hangar at Moffett Field, where more displays are set up, including a squid dissection table. Most of the kids are running around the hangar or eating lunch instead of watching the slicing of the squid.

Ballard and his team use student and teacher "argonauts" to actively do research on location on the subjects they're studying. This time, junior high and high school students from all over the world have converged on the Monterey Bay Research Center to participate and provide facts from experiments to the kids in the auditorium.

Austin Hill is impressed with the production and says that someday he might like to be an "argonaut" or even a scientist who studies the ocean.

"I like learning about all the different animals," Hill says after the broadcast. "My favorite thing about the JASON Project and the [Monterey Bay] Aquarium was the otters. They act a lot like humans."

Yun Fei Zong has decided he wants to be a computer engineer, because "that's where the pay is." However, he understands there is a need for engineers to direct the technology that is used behind the scenes on the JASON Project. He says he'd do it as long as he didn't have to go into space to fix the satellites.

This project is the ninth JASON expedition to date. It was conceptualized after last year's discovery that Jupiter's moon, Europa, is covered with sheets of ice.

According to the project's coordinators, JASON tries to compare a new discovery in outer space with existing natural functions on earth. This way, the students and scientists learn what the possibilities could be on other planets and moons like Europa.

Scientists theorize that beneath Europa's ice are oceans, much like those at the North Pole. If there are oceans, there may be life.

The JASON Project was founded in 1989 by Ballard. After his team discovered the wreck of the RMS Titanic using a robotic submarine called JASON, Ballard received a flood of letters from kids around the world who wanted to participate in his expeditions.

Since 1989, the sophistication of the project and the number of participants have gone through the roof. JASON kids have explored thermal vents on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and examined the natural diversity of such places as the Galapagos Islands and Belize.

The JASON Project also incorporates a Web site, so the kids can continue to track the expedition's progress and pose questions to the scientists who work on it. The site can be followed by anyone who's interested at www.jasonproject.org.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, April 1, 1998.
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