A mission to install a weather station in one of the most remote places in the world took on a humanitarian component when Scripps research vessel Roger Revelle took aboard a woman and her three children, who had been confined to a small atoll for more than a month. Helen Reef is an atoll, a ring-shaped coral reef, which is part of the Hatohobei state in the island nation of Palau located in the South Pacific. Although the atoll is about 15 miles long and six miles wide, only a small sand dune of an island rises above the water, barely 65 feet wide and 1,300 feetlong.