My Dearest Anais,

Today I woke up, and it is gray. From the top decks, from any deck, there is nothing to be seen. We are not in the shipping lanes, so there are few passing ships. Nothing but a lonesome albatross, our off and on companion.

Fiber optic cable boom lowered over port side of research vessel Atlantis.

We finished our first dive with Jason last night. Yesterday brought much frustration due to a series of constant delays and failures of equipment. As I mentioned, Jason is this little, unmanned submarine. It has a bunch of cameras mounted on its front (and one in back), an arm like a robot, propellers that drive the craft up, down, front, back and sideways and a small sonar (I explained sonar in my last letter, if you remember). One of the cameras can move like an eye. Jason is attached to the ship by a cable, and we can drive it around from a control room on the ship. What we are trying to do is use Jason to map the chimney-like structures made mainly of certain metallic-like minerals called sulfides and all sorts of worms, snails and other strange things growing on them. The idea is to move up and down around the sides of these chimneys while photographing the whole thing in great detail and at the same time determining its exact shape, which we do with the sonar and stereo cameras. The stereo image is really cool, so even though its hard to understand I've got to explain it to you. When you look at a stereo image of something, it seems like it's in 3 dimensions, as if you were actually looking at a real object rather than just a picture. Stereo images work the same way your eyes do. Your eyes allow you to sense how far away things are because they look at objects from two slightly different angles. A stereo image is made from two pictures taken of the same object, at slightly different angles. When you photograph an image in stereo you can sense the depth and see its real shape when you look at the photo with a special pair of glasses.

Small boat operations from the research vessel Atlantis to recover elevator.

Anyway, as I said, yesterday started out rather frustrating. The first thing we had to do was place three transponders on the ocean floor. These are small instruments that make a noise so that we know exactly where Jason is. If they work we can know the location to within about a centimeter(!!), which is about the size of your fingernail, but--guess what--two of them did not work (like our car, washing machine, etc.--I know what you're thinking). So, we had to tranport others to the ocean floor and then use Jason to put them in the right places. All of that took hours and hours. Finally, after more than 24 hours of work, we got everything working correctly and started mapping the sulfide chimneys. That's really fun because this is a world like I have never seen before or only seen in photographs, but here we are wandering around in a wilderness with a flashlight, and we can see it all in color and in stereo too. Jason was pulled back to the surface this morning. We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish with this first dive, which was to solve the problems we knew we would be faced with and to learn how to map the chimneys, so things are not so frustrating after all.

So that is all I have to say to you today. Great big kisses to you and Mama.

Love, Papa