One of the main functions of the website, besides entertaining interested Web surfers, is to link the scientists in Bolivia with teachers participating in an educational outreach. Called "Teacher as Scientist," the program involves educators at home in the scientific process, working alongside the researchers to determine what kind of data will be gathered in the field. There is even one teacher-scientist on the expedition team.

Students can follow the expedition through the live webcasts and daily updates. A worksheet has also been posted as a classroom resource.

The educational component of the expedition is a result of the funding provided by the Office of University Programs. But there are also those not financially invested in the expedition who are very interested in the results.

Last month, scientists at the "Environmental Catastrophes and Recovery in the Holocene" conference in London discussed the high incidence of disaster and fireball legends in the areas of South America, including Bolivia.

"If there was an impact in the last 10,000 years, then the logic would be that the survivors would be talking about it and including it in their traditions and legends," Peiser says. "If this proves to be an impact crater of a very young age, then this could have enormous consequences for our view of societal evolution and potentially might answer a lot of questions in the history of South America."

Garvin has studied impact craters, including Iturralde, while at Goddard, but he is now NASA’s lead Mars scientist. There are no plans to send an expedition to study impact craters on Mars, so the Bolivian trek is as close as Garvin will get. Even though the environments on the two planets are very different, the soft, dusty soils may be similar.

"There are a lot of these real subtle impact features that look like Iturralde, with no trees, on Mars," Garvin says. "Studying craters on Earth, we can get up close and personal with them; it’s the only way we’re going to understand what we have on a planet like Mars."

Garvin, who has traveled to exotic places including Kazakhstan to study impact craters, is not a part of the expedition and so awaits the data from the comfort of his office in Washington D.C.

"I’ll be frank," he said. "I’ve been to many impact sites on this planet and I find that my talents are better in the cold, dry environments. That’s part of the reason why I work on Mars. Compton is the type of guy who does real well in the jungle."

This trip will be Compton Tucker’s seventh or eighth Amazonian voyage. They seem almost natural to him as he calmly describes the jungle lifestyle he will lead. The team members eat two meals a day, prepared by a cook they hire, of rice and beans supplemented with fish they catch and things they’ve brought from home. The menu ranges from piranha to beef jerky.

The team’s base camp consists of tents pitched along a river in Puerto Araona, the main village of the Araona people, population: 110.

"And it’ll be hot and humid and there will be a lot of insects," Tucker says. "One of the big problems which most people don’t realize, in all the tropical forests I’ve been in, there isn’t much salt because it rains so much it would tend to wash it away. The social insects view sweating people like us as a great salt lick, so the social insects will communicate to other social insects where you are and so after two or three days, there will just be, as soon as the Sun comes up, hundreds if not thousands of bees and wasps who want to just land on you to get the salt. And of course there are a lot of mosquitoes."

But Tucker is not intimidated.

"Some people freak out but that’s just one of the things you have to endure…You just have to keep moving and every day you have to bathe, so you just get in the river and wash and you also wash your clothes because you want to get the salt out."

Killeen, who has led at least 15 Amazonian expeditions, has an equally optimistic outlook. "I think it’s going to be a great time," he says. "I’m looking forward to swinging a machete instead of thinking about traffic."

For others, though, it’s not the fear of insects or the primitive living conditions or even sometimes-stubborn indigenous people that keep them from the Iturralde Crater.

"I’d like to go," says Coronado, the Goddard engineer, "but my wife wouldn’t let me."