JASON VII: Adapting to a Changing Sea

Key JASON

Click on any of the features shown on the drawing above for an actual photograph from Key JASON

This year, Key JASON is set up to make it easy to communicate with sites offshore and easily transfer people to and from the offshore sites by boat. Therefore, we set up onshore right along a canal. We have access to a dock so that we can load and unload boats, and we are set to send a receive broadcast signals from the ship via microwave.

Key JASON brings together lots of pieces of communications equipment. We've arranged this equipment around a little courtyard. To the north end is the production trailer. This is basically a mobile TV editing studio. All of the audio and video signals for the program come through the production trailer, and are mixed together into the program which is then uplinked to satellite.

To the East side of the courtyard is the Interactivity (or I/A) trailer. This houses all the computers which control the interactivity functions in the program. All the questions from the PINS are received by the computers in the I/A trailer. There, the producers choose the questions that will be use in the live program. Argonauts will work in the I/A van on their online journal which we will upload to the Internet each day,

The West side of the courtyard is dominated by the EDS satellite uplink truck. This facility takes the program from the production trailer and sends it up to the satellite where it can be received by the PINS and other sites viewing the live broadcasts.

The fourth (south) side of the courtyard is a van set up with computers where EDS can demonstrate the technology they use to their visitors.

The most prominent feature of the site is the 80 foot RF Tower that was erected to hold all of the microwave antenas and other communications equipment that allow us to get audio, video and data to our offshore sites.

Visitors to Key JASON must check in at our vistor's tent, which stands next to the PR trailer. Reporters interested in this year's project can stop by the PR trailer to get information and an orientation to JASON.

Finally, all this equipment is supported by generators and other types of storage trucks that are arranged around the perimeter of the site.

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Gene Carl Feldman (gene@seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov) (301) 286-9428
Todd Carlo Viola, JASON Foundation for Education (todd@jason.org)
Revised: 18 April 1996