The ROV Jason again

The connectivity amount of my life with that of the world as seen in the online news is usually quite small. But a familiar item is currently in the news, the submersible robot called Jason, an ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle) that is tethered to the mother ship by a data and power cable, and can descend deep in the ocean to perform photography and gathering sample materials from way down there. In the current news, Jason has made video and taken samples of an undersea volcano out in the ocean 125 miles from Samoa, about 1000 meters down from the surface of the ocean to the top of the volcano that probably has been erupting for a million years already, and has a unique ecosystem living on its energies, primarily bacteria that thrive in the sulfuric acid environment, and then shrimp that munch the bacteria. One of the articles online is at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8419736.stm which has some still photos and a video of the erupting volcano as recorded by Jason's cameras.

The ROV Jason had also played a part in my life indirectly, as it had been used to collect seafloor core samples, which I processed, picked and sorted microscopic creatures called Foraminifera as a volunteer project for Dr E. Perez, who gave me a Jason cap as a souveneir of my efforts on that marine biology project I did at the LACNHM. I have a photostory of that volunteer work, along with photos of the cap with the Jason emblem on it which can be seen at:
http://www.escalatorhi.com/PhotoStories/nhmlacforaminifera.html

It is nice to have a feeling of familiarity when reading that article in the news about Jason and the volcano, of a familiar entity which had been instrumental in gathering seafloor samples which I personally had spent many months doing tedious yet interesting grunt work doing the scientific data gathering to enable population density measurements of tiny benthic Forams that had lived deep undersea.