Little things can make a big difference.
A C-141 cargo plane, which made an unscheduled drop of a crucial piece of gear. In our case, the little thing was a flawed circuit board in the ship's primary fluid sampler, a sophisticated piece of equipment developed by an NOAA team led by chemist Dave Butterfield. It's also crucial to our expedition. Despite the collective expertise of the mechanics and techies aboard ship, we were unable to fix it. After a week of faxes, e-mails and phone calls between Dave, who headed up the team that developed it, and his counterparts on dry land, a plan was hatched.