Youngsters around the world involved in Solo Spirit adventure

When adventurer Steve Fossett and his Solo Spirit balloon soar aloft from Northam, Western Australia, this summer, he'll take with him the inquiring spirits of elementary and secondary students around the world. As many as 4,000 young people from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, South America and South Africa will take part.

Solo Spirit Science Director Keith J. Bennett, affiliate associate professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has linked up with a worldwide Web-based weather education project based in Queensland, Australia.

Sel Kerans, education adviser for learning technology in Murrumba, Queensland, is coordinator for Project Atmosphere Australia Online (PAA). "Schools from around the world - 140 so far, 100 or so Australian - will be following the journey, with the Australian schools as host," Kerans explained.

PAA has been running for six years. It has a large Web site and six e-mail listserves. For the Fossett venture, PAA plans news and discussion resources for teachers and discussion groups for students aged 8 to 17. More than 170 educators teaching at all levels around the world have subscribed to the teachers' listserve.

Students taking part will download weather information and the location, height, distance traveled and direction of the balloon from the Solo Spirit Web site and other weather-related Web sites. From these data, they will learn about conditions in the upper atmosphere as opposed to ground-level and lower-middle atmosphere.

"We will have experts on line, meteorologists from Australia and the United States, to answer questions, clarify relationships between the upper atmosphere and weather on the ground," Kerans said. "Through this they may gain an understanding of how wild conditions are up there and why this will be such a great achievement.

"This is a unique opportunity," Kerans added, to analyze, learn and discuss weather conditions with professional meteorologists and other students around the world.

Bennett, director of Washington University's Project Aria, a space science outreach and research project involving University students and area kindergarten through 12th-grade pupils, pursued school partners in Australia both because of the launch site and, more importantly, because American students, unlike their down-under counterparts, will be on vacation throughout the launch window in August.

A childhood friend from St. Louis, now a professor at Monash University near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, suggested that Bennett contact Kerans and the PAA as potential collaborators in Solo Spirit's science education opportunities. Kerans and Bennett also are collaborating on an upcoming space education program known as Aria-3, a U.S./Australian project that will carry 22 experiments from eight joint U.S./Australian K-12 teams into space this fall on the space shuttle Endeavour.

PAA's Web site, which offers scores of resources and learning projects to teachers and students, receives about 10,000 hits a month. It has been a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge for pioneering information technology projects and the Global Junior Challenge.