Well, another amazing day!! Since my last report we have been out spider hunting. Rosie Gillespie, our resident biologist, took us out into the rain forest after dark to collect spiders to study during todays broadcast. It is quite incredible how much we can miss when we stroll through a piece of the countryside alone compared with going through it with someone like Rosie who knows so much about it. It was a real education and more fun than I expected it to be. I would never have believed that there could be such a creature as a "Happy Face Spider" until I found one and yes, it did have markings which made it look as if it had a smiling face!
Today started just as early with a light breakfast at 2am folowed by departure into a misty night an hour later. We were assigned our duties by Pattie our "stage manager" and I was then escorted to the nerve centre of the whole operation. I had to go to visit Art the director for an early morning conference about the section I had to cover later in the day.
I had to "wrap up" the Astronomy section in the last two broadcasts of the day. We have been incredibly fortunate because the project has not only had some spectacular lava flows just yards from where we have set up but we also witnessed a spectacular eruption on Io, one of Jupiter's moons during the last week. My job was to summarise this and emphasise the spectacular effect volcanoes have on the landscape. Since these eruptions began several years ago, hundreds of acres have been added to the Hawaiian coast-line and maps have to be continually altered to keep us up to date. Io's eruption made a new volcano on the moon at latitude 40 degrees south, longitude 95 degrees West. If you have the Jason Curriculum you can mark it on for yourself on the curriculum sheet "Mapping Io"
Drop us all a line on the Jason discussion corner.
Best wishes
Richard Cooper
Teacher Argonaut, United Kingdom
JASON Project homepage || Teachers' Guide || Students' Corner || Search
Gene Carl
Feldman
(gene@seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov)
(301) 286-9428
Todd Carlo Viola,
JASON Foundation for Education
(todd@jason.org)
