"Get ready for a wet, wild adventure," Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard tells hundreds of thousands of students joining him in cyberspace on his latest interactive science expedition from an Amazon rain forest.
At the click of a mouse, students can link up with the famous underwater explorer on a virtual field trip, help his team do research on giant ants and poisonous snakes in Peru's steamy rain forest, or even drive "scientific robots."
Using satellite technology and the Internet, Mr Ballard wants to bring the thrill of discovery to millions of students and hopes to encourage them to take up science as a career.
"Pulling all this together is like doing the Super Bowl live," he said of his daily broadcasts from a remote scientific camp in Peru's rain forest, which has been wired up with an intricate network of cameras that broadcast experiments live.
Mr Ballard also presents programmes several times a day that are watched by students and their teachers via satellite linkups or on the Internet. He came up with the idea of involving children and teachers in his projects when he was inundated with thousands of letters from students after his return from the historic Titanic expedition in 1986.
"I saw from the discovery of the Titanic an opportunity to excite kids - a way to get them switched on to science," Mr Ballard said in a satellite telephone interview from Peru.
In response to children asking how he found the wreck of the ill-fated luxury liner, he established the JASON Project, an interactive science programme that takes children and teachers on field trips and involves millions more via the Internet.
The project is named after Mr Ballard's robotic submersible, which in turn took its name from the mythical Greek hero who led the argonauts on a quest for the Golden Fleece.
"We use JASON field trips as a fantastic way of exciting kids. We wrap science up into an exciting envelope so they are excited about learning," Mr Ballard said. "A lot of people think science is done by white, male nerds and that it isn't for everybody. We are trying to change that perception," he added.
The project is aimed at middle schools, where the fight to attract young scientists is "won or lost", Ballard said. "We focus on impressionable young children who are making some fundamental decisions about their education. We want to get them switched on to science and technology."
Mr Ballard's trip to the rain forest from March 1st to March 12th was his 10th JASON project. Others have taken him and his students to hot lava slopes in Hawaii, coral reefs in Belize and Wyoming's Yellowstone Park, among other ecological treasures.
For this trip, more than 30 tonnes of telecommunications equipment was taken 100 miles downriver to the remote camp in Peru's rain forest, where Mr Ballard described living conditions as arduous and said protecting machines from humidity was a daily challenge.
"You get up every morning and dump tarantulas out of your shoes or try not to get in the water anywhere near where the piranhas are," he said.
Sophisticated television studios have been built on barges moored at the base of the camp. "It's almost as if a spaceship has landed in the middle of the jungle. It's hard for the natives here to comprehend exactly what has landed in their backyard," Mr Ballard said.
Miles of cable has been run through the forest, linking up six scientists and their teams at distant locations such as 120 feet up in the jungle canopy or lower down in the forest where scientists are looking at dinosaur ants and a new species of frog called the "laughing frog".
The National Geographic Society in Washington is one of several locations in the US where programmes are broadcast daily. Three giant screens fill the stage and students line up to pose questions to Mr Ballard ranging from how many species are in the forest to why snakes wrap themselves around trees.
The JASON project website is www.jasonproject.org.
