My dearest Anais,

We arrived yesterday at our position over the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and here we sit, stationary, waiting for something to happen. We are waiting, specifically, for ROPOS to work. ROPOS, if you remember, is our underwater robot that does all the work on the bottom of the ocean. There have been a series of problems, so we still have not been able to launch it. Hopefully that will happen sometime today. We are learning to be patient.

Spider temperature probe. ROPOS picks up the spider temperature probe by the softball and presses the seven probes against a structure. The probes are spring-loaded so they can conform to an irregular surface. The temperature data will tell us something about the fluid conduits within the structure.

In my effort to describe to you bizarre things on the ship, of which there is no shortage, let me describe to you the spider. There's a photograph of it, I hope, on our web page, just look for something really odd. The spider is not the sort of thing you'll find down at Lenny's hardware store. It is this group of seven metal rods mounted through two pieces of clear plastic. Curly wires, which are attached to one end of the rods, are collected together and pass through a piece of plastic tubing and go to a metal cylinder. Then there is the softball, an official softball mind you, attached with a bolt to the plastic frame holding the rods. So, guess what this is...You give up, right?

It's a contraption to measure the temperature at several different points on the surface of the sulfide chimney. You see, we'd like to know how hot the chimneys are that we are going to try to collect. We've got to do this before we collect them because very hot water is flowing through them and keeping them hot, but as soon as we remove them they'll become cold. (The water at the bottom of the ocean is almost freezing.) Also, there should be quite a difference in temperature from one place to another, depending on exactly where the passageways are inside the chimneys. We'd like to know that, too, because we expect that there will be different minerals and different kinds of bacteria growing inside the chimneys depending on how hot it is and also different animals growing on the outside of the chimneys. Anyway, each rod is a little temperature sensor thermometer, and they are attached to springs, as you can see in the picture. That's because the outsides of the sulfide chimneys are not flat, they are rough. So the springs you see in the picture are so that when the spider is placed on an irregular surface they all touch that surface and we'll be able to measure the temperature at each one of those points.

If you are a clever little girl, which I know you are, you would now be asking me what the softball is for. That's so that ROPOS, our underwater robot, can hold the spider against the rock. You see, ROPOS has claws, and the claws are just the right size to hold softballs, so thats what we use.

I hope you are having a good time with Grandma and Grandpa and that you have made some new friends. Don't forget to write to me.

Love, Papa