Journey's End

Well, things are back to normal. I'm back at home in Cincinnati, and have already dealt with ordinary things like cleaning up cat vomit.   I have been so sleep deprived that last night I slept almost 14 hours; I hope to do as well tonight.  My journey home was over two days: the first, a 5 hour flight on a C17 into Christchurch, and yesterday, a 31 hour test-of-will that included four flights, a six hour layover in Auckland, customs and immigration (which went pretty well this time), and the usual cramped airline seating.  Of course, it was Tuesday the whole time because I crossed the International Date Line.  (My Tuesday lasted 44 hours, I think, while the Friday I lost on the way down only lasted four hours.)  I did manage to score some excellent blueberry pancakes in Auckland during the layover, so have a happy memory there.

My last full day in McMurdo was spent doing a last few fun things. I slept in, and went to brunch at ten. The day was grey and blustery. None the less, a group of four of us went hiking towards Castle Rock, a large formation on top of the peninsula leading to McMurdo from Mt Erebus.  The conditions were the most Antarctic-like that I have experienced. Any exposed skin was in danger of frostbite. Fortunately, the gear we are given is exactly for conditions like this, and all of us were fine. I had to turn around for "bag drag" at four, before we reached Castle Rock. After that, there was dinner, and a few games of RummiKube in the Coffee House.  At ten that night, we had reserved some time in the bandroom for the last hurrah of the Long Drops, our little CREST band of lots of guitars, a bass, and a vocalist. We played all our not-quite-ready-for-prime-time hits (including our very own "MacTown Girl"), and had lots of fun doing it. 

At 3AM, it was time to get ready for transport at 4AM to the Pegasus airfield for the flight out. Weather was good, the C17 was definitely on its way. After a week of weather delays, there lots of people eager to get out of Antarctica, myself and my roommate (who was supposed to leave last Thursday) included. We stood on the ice shelf for a couple hours, getting cold toes, before the plane arrived. The Prime Minister of Norway disembarked with much pomp and ceremony and cameras, there to celebrate a century since Amundsen reached the Pole in the famous Race that led to Scott's death during his return, after learning that Amundsen beat him to the Pole by a month. We watched the unloading and loading of the C17 for another hour. Finally, we embarked, and thus began my long journey home. As a final gesture of defiance from Antarctica, our plane was loaded with ice core samples that had to be kept frozen, so the temperature in the plane hovered around freezing the whole way home. We stayed in full Antarctic gear for the whole trip back to Christchurch.

McMurdo is a bit like summer camp: a small campus, lots of planned activities, hiking and biking (no swimming though).  The people who sign up to work there in support of the science missions (cooks, dishwashers, janitors, mechanics, aviators, fuel handlers, etc) all have some sort of amazing back story.  They are adventurers, easy going, and very accepting of each others oddities, which become quite apparent in such a cooped up spot.  Not everyone can take it - I met a guy departing on the same plane who had been fired and sent from the continent.  He was going loopy with the strain of the small place.  Cabin fever can be brutal.  All in all, I find McMurdo to be a nice break from reality, the sort of place that's nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Others feel the opposite way. They return every year.  There are many 20 season veterans there whose job is to drive a tractor over snow. They love being there. It is absolutely incredibly beautiful in good weather. It's definitely special.  Someday, I might return.  But not next year. Nor the next....

As a final comment, let me mention that it was a pleasure to be somewhere that cell phones did not work.  There was a not a constant background hum of ring tones, nor shouted one-sided conversations impossible to avoid.  No one could forget to turn off their phone during an activity.  I could tell the new arrivals. They stood forlornly by the entrance to the cafeteria with phones in hand, staring at them, trying to conjure up a few bars of signal. No such luck, and I hope none for a long time.  Keep McMurdo cell free.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me!

McMurdo Square & Contra dance

Friday night was great fun. Collin (the Fiddler), Tim (the Caller), and I introduced many McMurdites to contradance in the Byrd Field Center (BFC). We had about 23 people show up, with only a few more men than women, which is an amazing feat in a place that has 3 times as many men as women.  Some of the dancers were familiar with contra.  All had fun.  I heard several dancers ask as they left when Collin would do it again, because they wanted to be there. Success!  Of course, I won't be here (I hope) so Collin will be finding a new guitarist.

The administration is well set up to facilitate these cultural offerings by small groups to the community.  We were able to snag an excellent sound system, get help moving it, arrange a place to hold the dance, and spread advertising all within the space of a few days.  There is a board of community activities which is updated weekly. Individuals/small groups sponsoring events can post their flyers there.  There's a lot to do here if you are willing to do almost anything.

I am on the manifest for the flight departing tomorrow (Monday) morning. I am supposed to get up at 3am, check the web, and show for transport at 4am if it the plane has left Christchurch. The C-17s don't spend much time on the ice; I don't think they even turn off their engines. Some of the C-130 pilots were telling me that this is how they take planes to the Pole: they arrive there, leave the engines running while the plane is unloaded and reloaded, then takeoff within the hour. It is cold enough there that fuel gels in the lines if the engines are stopped.  Here at McMurdo, it is not that cold, but apparently they don't often like to take that chance.

Here is a video of our contradance that I was able to load a portion of to youtube. Bandwidth is small enough here that it took about an hour to upload just this short segment.

http://youtu.be/EsMVlFBIm30

See you next week?

Pressure Ridges

I have wanted to tour the pressure ridges near Scott Base since the first time I saw them.  Both previous visits were too late in the season for them to be safe.  This year, I made it. My life is complete.

The intrepid explorers

I hope you'll understand my enthusiasm when you understand what they are. The ice from the glaciers in the TransAntarctic mountains flows out to form the Ross Ice Shelf, which we are on the edge of.  It pushes against Ross Island, upon which McMurdo defiantly sits, and crumples like uplifting mountains against the shore. 

The result is some fantastical formations.  We walked a posted path with a trained guide. The path is checked every few days for new cracks which can swallow the unwary tourist, either causing a twisted ankle, or worse, sending them to an icy oblivion beneath the sea, destined to become seal snacks.  The weather was gray and snowy, so the pictures do not do the uplifted ice formations the justice that pictures taken in full sunlight would. I like the pics with the sun shrouded by the clouds, though.  The black slug is a big fat lazy Weddell seal.

"Juuust sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...."

Flight Ready!

Thursday we declared "flight ready," meaning that if an opportunity to launch was available for tomorrow we could do it.  In practice, this means that we can still fool around with the detector, letting it run on the ground, tuning various components.  And all that fooling around, plus various adventures, has led to my negligence regarding this blog.  I apologize, Dear Readers, and offer this meager replacement for the missing daily posts.

At work, I have been working with Stephane diligently doing final tuning of the veto system. I am happy to say that it is finely tuned! I have every expectation that the system will veto anything and everything charged trying to get through our detector.  Documentation is posted, plots are made, and fingers are crossed.

Yet another shot of the CREST gang, in UM maize and blue

The weather here has been gray and snowy. As a result, there has not been much fun going on. I continue to be sleep deprived since my roommate goes to bed late and gets up early... but wait! There's more to this story:  Gray and snowy means that flights on and off continent are delayed and/or cancelled. Or both.  Remember last post I said two colleagues were leaving Thursday?  One was my roommate.  He is still here (Saturday night)!  The other one got out just today.  My roommate has been on the manifest of four flights so far, and even showed up this morning (after getting me up at 5:30) for transport to the airfield only to be told he was bumped for some med evac cases.  His flight for tomorrow is cancelled, so his original departure of last Thursday is now scheduled to be same as mine: Monday morning. Will we make it?  Weather is still supposed to be marginal, so who knows?  This blog may get more entries than I intend.  I "bag drag" (deliver my baggage) for my Monday morning flight Sunday (tomorrow) afternoon at 4pm. I will have then (our term:) "bug drug."  That doesn't mean I will get out. My roomie has been living out of his carry on for the last few days. He is "bag draggled."

There have been a few fun things going on. We took part of last Thursday to have the last song of the Long Drops, our group band at the hanger.  There was some very creative percussion going on.  We took another group photo, this time with the University of Michigan-supplied fleeces (CREST logo, maize and blue) in front of the McMurdo sign. You can see the weather is poor.  Also, I toured the pressure ridges (a blog post about it soon) and last night I played guitar for the first McMurdo Area Country Hoedown and Square Dance.  What great fun!  We had about 20 extremely enthusiastic dancers, and I and Collin the fiddler (remember him?) played til our fingers hurt, over two hours.  I don't have any pictures myself, but I am hoping to get some from others soon.

Hero shot

Some of us are leaving Thursday; we suddenly realized we needed a group shot before we started to scatter to the 4 corners of the Earth.  Here is the CREST Ice Team:

The CREST Ice Team

And here is a pretty good photo Stephane took of me in Scott's Hut:

The instrument continues to play with our heads.  Today it played Whack-A-Mole with noisy phototubes (they kept popping up in different places for no reason), and then after a complete run-down of the battery test one of the data disks caused the flight computer to hang during boot -- a bad thing that kept some of our heroes out at the hanger until the late late shuttle at 8:30, missing dinner.

Currently I am scheduled to depart here Monday, leave Christchurch Tuesday morning at 6AM, then something like 30 hours later arrive in Cincinnati.

Scott's Hut

You are probably aware that it is from this area that Robert Falcon Scott started his epic failure of a journey into the heart of Antarctica in his quest to be first to the South Pole. The place is practically littered with huts of gear and food that his expedition left behind. There is one hut about 500 yards from downtown McMurdo, on appropriately named Hut Point. This hut was put there during an early joint expedition of Scott and Shackleton.  The site is protected, and is only occasionally open for tours. I took one of these this yesterday, and have some photos of the inside to share.

The hut is a prefab unit Scott purchased in Australia. It was designed to keep people cool in the outback. The first thing that you notice as you walk in is how incredibly funky the smell is. The next thing you notice is how it looks like hardly anything has happened since Scott left. There are seal bodies and sheep carcasses that have been preserved in the cold dry weather here, like the Chilean Andes mummies. There are boxes and boxes of dog biscuits, some clothing hanging out to dry, and shelves full of tinned chocolate, tea, meats, and other foodstuffs.

The area around McMurdo is also littered with crosses commemorating those who gave their lives here for one reason or another. The cross on Hut Point is for George Vince, the doctor in Scott's expedition, who was last seen walking across the sea ice, but never arrived. He probably fell through a hole and drowned. Another cross, on top of Ob Hill, is for Scott himself, and has the famous quote from Tennyson, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" engraved on it. Yet another cross memorializes a young man named Williams, who was driving a tractor hauling supplies in from a Navy vessel during the establishment of McMurdo Station and fell through the sea in 350 fathoms of water. His body was never recovered, nor was the tractor.  Now Williams Field (aka Willy Field), the smaller ice airfield for smaller planes near LDB, is named for him.  Call me crazy, but I would rather not be immortalized for getting killed.

Status report

My little camera: purple pics only!!

Hi Everyone.  It's been pretty darn busy in and out of the hanger lately.  The weather has been very fine until yesterday afternoon. It was sunny, warm, and muddy, but then the wind picked up and now you can lean a little without falling over out here at LDB. There's plenty of icy fetch for the wind to build on the ice, and the wind makes an otherwise pleasant day quite unpleasant.

Let's see if I can report the goings on:

1. My little camera died. I have a Canon Powershot Elph that suddenly started not retracting the lens when turned off. It won't autofocus either, so pictures look really silly. For some reason the colors are off as well.  For this reason, I am now dependent on the mercy of colleagues for pictures, and my blogs will be less colorful as a result.

CREST in a fog

2. There was a really cool ice fog out at the hanger Saturday morning. We couldn't see further than about a hundred yards. It dissipated quickly, though.  We had more hang testing during the fog, and it made for some cool pix.

3. In the hanger, I replaced veto tube 27 on the CREST instrument between yesterday and today (Sunday). This is -- er, was -- my problem child. I threw out the bad baby and got a new one. The new tube is working fine so far. Later this week we'll take it outside and see if it is happy in the great outdoors, unlike its predecessor.  Today I examined recent data to see if there need to be further adjustments to the various electronics settings on the veto detectors.

Underneath CREST with the problem child

4. Walk to top of Ob Hill.  I went on my own Thursday night to the top of Ob Hill, where I met Shuttle Bob (Bob drives a shuttle and talks on the radio a lot, hence the name).  We chatted for a while in very pleasant weather.

5. Bike ride to Scott Base.  I and a few colleagues had planned to go to a special late closing of the Scott Base store in order to do last minute shopping. It's a 30 minute walk, which is no big deal. I had been told that there were bikes available, and when I mentioned this, there was a mad rush to find bikes. There's a big stash behind one of the bars, but they hadn't been tended to since last summer, and the tires were all flat.  Fortunately we noticed a few people just returning from a bike ride on bikes that were in decent shape. Between the muddy roads, big hills, and loose earth, we ended up the trip tired, muddy, and exhilarated.  Oh yes  -  and a little poorer, since we spent money at the store.  After we were done, we parked the bikes where we had found them for the next person to enjoy.

The long and winding road back from Scott Base

Bike Team GO!

6. Debut of Jon as a bass player for a McMurdo rhythm and blues cover band last night (Saturday). Jon is an excellent bassist, and last night he played his first gig with a local band. He acquitted himself quite well.  A good time was had by all at the party.

My Ice Colleagues

There are currently nine CREST scientists and technicians on the Ice right now preparing the payload for launch.  This is a fair portion of the total people involved with the experiment, but not everyone could come down, or they were techs for hire, so to speak. Allow me to introduce my Ice Colleagues to you.

L to R: Musser, me, Ameel, Gennaro, Schubnell, Lang

Jim Musser is the experiment PI (Principle Investigator), which means he is ultimately answerable to the success or failure of this experiment. Ouch.  Jim was on my PhD thesis committee in 1991.  At Indiana University, he oversaw the integration of the various subsystems into one functioning instrument. To do so required that he spend about a year on intensive debugging of the complicated data acquisition system.

Me: Most of you know me.  I am a professor at Northern Kentucky University.  Usually you'll find me in the classroom each semester, but I keep a research lab going at the same time. I have several undergrad students, and we work on various hardware and software efforts associated with my two projects, CREAM and CREST, both sponsored by NASA.  I am here to prepare for the first launch of CREST.

Jon Ameel is an electronics tech from University of Michigan. He designed many of the electronics boards in the instrument and oversaw their production, testing, and installation. He is here for the longest of anybody on the project: he arrived early November for flight preparation but is also staying for recovery, so won't depart until early February.

Joe Gennaro is a University of Michigan grad student who has made himself indispensable.  Joe has taught himself all about how to write flight software, communicate with hardware, examine data, run simulations, etc.  He's also extraordinarily funny, and his backup career is to write for Saturday Night Live.

Michael Schubnell, also from UM, would style himself as more of an astronomer than particle physicist, I think. His other projects are focused on the search for dark matter candidates.  He is a veteran of many balloon campaigns, and would just as soon live in McMurdo, where the food is free, tasty, and you don't have have to do your own dishes.

Mike Lang is a tech from Indiana University with tons of Navy experience and years at the IU cyclotron. He's been all around the world but I think this is his first time in Antarctica.  Mike does it all, mechanical or electrical.  He is often seen in a hard hat as LiftMaster for the CREST group, which means whenever the crane is turned on he gets to run it or work directly with the CSBF guy who is operating it.

Nahee

Me with Stephane

Stephane Coutu: A professor at Penn State University, Stephane is our globe-trotting French-Canadian polyglot, and superb purveyor of physics to the masses.  He and I are responsible for the veto system on CREST.  I have worked with Stephane since my year in Italy on MACRO, in 1992.

Nahee Park is a postdoc at University of Chicago who is never far from a computer device. She has created many of the software tools necessary to unpack and examine the data.  I know Nahee from her earlier work on the CREAM experiment, on which she did her PhD thesis.

Scott Wakely is a professor at the University of Chicago, and is responsible for the power system and various software aspects of housekeeping and flight.  He's a mean guitarist and goes on my list of funniest people I know.

Wakely

Last but not least is the CREST experiment itself -- herself? --  who has her own personality and particular set of desires.  Mostly, she seems to like solar power, warm temperatures, and a clean data uplink.  Lately she has been fairly cantankerous.  At this very moment we are finishing a communications test started during the hang test, and had a channel of electronics fail.  This means we will probably unpack her from the foam blanket and remove a channel, fix, and replace it.

Hang test

Yesterday (Wednesday) we had a hang test, which means we hung the instrument from the launch vehicle (a fancy crane) and ran it for hours while all the communications were tested.  The instrument passed, with only a few glitches, which we were able to correct or magically fixed themselves.  Not all the CSBF communications worked though, so we will go back outside to test them after they get fixed.  We also forgot to test uplinking through all three available communications channels (for the geeks among you, they are line-of-sight telemetry, TDRSS satellite, and Iridium satellite).

Sadly, my errant problem child showed it's true colors during the test. The pattern is that when it's warm, it works, when it's cold, it doesn't.  There's probably a cold-solder joint in the tube base.  Anyway, the upshot is that I can either make sure it keeps warm in flight by putting an electric blanket on it, or replace it. The first requires power and wiring, and runs the risk of our guess as to how much blanket to use being too much or too little. The latter runs the risk of damaging the detector during the switch (I have to tear into a wrap job and pry off a glued disk) and then having the new tube be just as flaky as the old one.

A replacement is a two day affair; I still want to see a "smoking gun" piece of evidence for the tube being the source of the trouble.  When we roll out to retest the communications, I'll watch the tube quit working, then wrap it in handwarmers to see if it comes back.  If it does, then I choose between the options outlined above.

We are only a few days from being flight ready, at which point it becomes a waiting game. The winds aloft have to be just right, and they are currently not predicted to set in before December 15, and likely later than that but still before Christmas. It's time for me to start thinking about coming home. I put in my request this morning for a 12 December departure from McMurdo.  I do not plan to stay for the launch. I'll be a US data-watcher while the instrument is in the air. 

In other news, my small camera has bitten the dust. The lens will no longer retract on my Canon Powershot. After much internet surfing and some camera deconstructing, it is now even worse than it was.  I guess I know what I'll soon be buying a new one of. In the meantime, I am hauling around my Nikon, which is not nearly so convenient.

Fully Operational Death Star

Stephane gets the squeeze beneath the instrument

The last two days have seen a great deal of progress in preparing the instrument for flight. We think we will have a "hang test" on Thursday, in which we simulate the conditions of flight by hanging from the crane, relying solely on radio communications, then declare "flight ready" directly afterwards.  I then foresee hanging around for about  a week being trained to operate the instrument during flight and getting in some of the last minute visits to places around here that I have thus far been too busy to do: climb Castle Rock again, go on a pressure ridges tour, and go skiing one more time.

We managed to fix a bothersome problem with the veto calibration system.  The signal from an LED pulser was not bright enough to fire our phototube detectors, so we had to figure out how to make it brighter. After much sleuthing, we discovered that an attenuator (ie piece of dark plastic) had been put along the light path to purposefully dim the signal earlier. We removed that (at great danger to Stephane's physical well-being) and are now fully calibrating.  We still have one nagging problem-child phototube which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. We need to figure it out in the coming week.  Loose cable? Cold solder joint?  Bad PMT? The mystery continues.

Fully operational Death Star, sunbathing with friendly neighbor

Today the weather was spectacular. We are getting warm (35 F) sunny days again.  McMurdo is again McMuddo, and a river runs through it.  Out at the hanger, we rolled CREST out into the sun to test its solar panel system.  It passed with flying colors, and we are now ready to see what this armed and fully operational Death Star can accomplish.  In the photo you can also see our neighbors (STO) had their instrument outside as well, waiting for the Sun to appear around the corner of our building in order to use it as a target to help align their multiple telescopes.

Getting a Clue in the Coffee Bar

To relax, we have been playing games in the Coffee Bar, or playing music. Last night we had reserved the bandroom, and played together for about three hours.  I've heard better, and I've heard worse.

Turkey Trot 5K

Well, I survived the Turkey Trot 5K.  It was touch and go. The first half was all an uphill slog of various grades (mostly pretty darn steep) and the last half was all downhill (much better) on icy and/or rocky road. The uphill portions were brutal.  It took me just over 30 minutes to go 5K, and I wasn't the last one in. Not my best time by a long shot. I beat some of those young whippersnapper types, at least.

The race was a great show opportunity for some people. Three self-styled MC's of the event dressed as turkeys and started the race. Some participants dressed up as well. I saw a few penguins, a few cross-dressers, and a cow.

The starting line

After the race I napped for more than an hour. I missed brunch (ended at noon; lunch is usually until one; I had no idea it was a brunch day), so by the time our scheduled seating for the special Thanksgiving meal came along I was quite hungry.  The dinner was very good. The tables were nicely set with tablecloths, most people dressed up, and some brought wine.

Along the course

We continue to work towards declaring "flight ready" the first few days of December. That means this week!  We tested both solar panels today and found they provided more than enough power to keep our instrument running as long as the sun shines.  I hunted down light leaks in our veto paddles.  They are only manifested when the instrument is in bright sunlight, which it will be when at the top of the atmosphere.  Meanwhile, I have identified a problem in the timing calibration system most likely due to a broken fiber. The problem effects half the veto system, so it is imperative to do what we can to find and fix it.  It is likely a broken optical fiber that is still in its casing, so some light is transmitted but not enough to do the calibration properly.

Near the finish line. See how much happier I am?

No time for much fun. I bought powerful medicine at the store and am dosing myself and feel much better.  We have managed to have group game nights the last two evenings. We played Clue. I won at Trivial Pursuits!  But I lost big time in Scrabble Deluxe.

Snowy, busy days

Hello from the Bottom of the World!  I haven't posted for a few days now because I've been really busy working lately.  Nothing personal, I assure you.

There is a fresh layer of about three inches of snow since Sunday.  Really, it's hard to tell exactly how much there is since the wind (which has been gusty around 15-30 knots) blows it around so much.  In fact, as I write snow is whipping around LDB.  We all leave deep footprints now everywhere we go.  It's supposed to be worse tomorrow (Thanksgiving for us) but getting better into the weekend, which is nice, because we'll celebrate Thanksgiving this Saturday with the 5K Turkey Trot and feasting -- and a day off!

Calibration fun. I made 32 of these today...

The snow and wind has put the kibosh on skiing and hiking at a time when everyone is prepping for the 5K. As a result the gym has been packed.  I signed up for the Turkey Trot and now must prepare....

So what are we doing all day at work this week with the instrument?  There has been routine calibration work with excitement mixed in. It seems every morning when we arrive the instrument is in some sort of crisis mode.  Two days ago we found that the flight computer would not boot when the instrument was running on battery power instead of ground power - - bad, since we will not be running an extension cord to the instrument during the flight! And then this morning the data disks were full and the root disk was filled up as well, which, as those geeks among you out there know, is a bad thing. But we think of these as opportunities, and are able to change software/hardware etc to compensate so if the conditions happen again either the failure mode won't happen or an easy fix is in place that we can implement remotely.

...and 32 of these. Thar's gold in them thar plots!

Tonight I will go hear the weekly science lecture, about glaciers this time. I tend to skip the ones about fish with antifreeze for blood and can thus live in below freezing temperatures.  I've heard about them before.  But how the ice moves in Antarctica fascinates me, is being better understood each year, so I have a good chance of learning something new tonight.

Otherwise, I am afraid I am recatching The McMurdo Crud.  Apparently this is one of the worst years ever for it. Everyone is walking around coughing, sneezing, or otherwise miserable My first week here I was sick, then last week I felt better, but I can right at this moment that it is coming back. Bleh.  Of the nine of us in our group, more than half of us are suffering currently with The Crud.

Pegasus crash site visit

A Delta

For entertainment last night (Saturday night) I and a couple colleagues signed up to go on a trip to visit the site of a plane crash in 1970 out at the Pegasus runway.  It required 14 miles (one hour) of shoulder to shoulder bouncy travel in a Delta to get there. We spent about an hour exploring the wreck -- or rather, what was still visible above the snow -- climbing all over it in the process.  Lots of pictures and goofing off later, we all got back in the Delta and returned to McMurdo.

The Pegasus crash site. The tail fin is visible.

You will be happy to know that no one was hurt in the crash. In those old days, a flight from Christchurch took 10 hours, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse by the time that plane arrived. They were short on fuel, couldn't see the runway, and had strong, gusty winds.  The pilot took a last pass, had everyone buckle their seatbelt, and hoped for the best. Fortunately, he missed the few structures near the runway, and glided to a halt, although he dipped a wing during the glide, which sheared off, spinning the plane around.  The most dangerous part was then the three hour wait in frigid temperatures before getting rescued. The rescuers couldn't find the plane, the weather was so bad, and the subzero temps were starting to take their toll on the crash victims.  Fortunately, there was story book ending, with a complete rescue.

Planking the plane. Yes, that's me.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Today, when a plane gets to the halfway point between Christchurch and McMurdo, a critical look is taken at the McMurdo weather, and if it looks like it is worsening, the plane will "boomerang" -- go back to Christchurch.  This is much to the dismay of the passengers, who spend as much time on the plane as it takes to get to McMurdo in the aborted attempt only to have to do it again the next day.

Shifting gears

Hello everyone! We have reached a milestone with the detector - again.  All detectors are on, functional, and streaming data. We are done with repairs!!  I am especially pleased that we were able to locate a few troublesome light leaks on the veto system (my detector), and one of the veto detectors that seemed not to work came alive after plugging in the cable. That helps tremendously....

So now I can shift gears from gluing, cabling, fixing, and worrying to examining the ground data as we take it, and learning care and feeding of the instrument in flight mode.  I am looking forward to exploring something that looks like science instead of nuts and bolts.  It's all fun.

Random art shot

Meanwhile, I have resolved to take a hike or exercise each evening. Two nights ago (as you know if you read my blog regularly) I hiked up Ob Hill. Last night I hiked the Hut Point loop, which goes by one of Sir Robert Falcon Scott's huts he set up for his ill-fated expedition of about a century ago as he sought to be first to the Pole. You history buffs know he lost spectacularly, dying in the process only about 30 miles from here, on the Ross Ice shelf (same ice I am on right now at LDB!), along with his men.  Some may say he deserved it - he brought PONIES for a slog to the Pole, through ice and snow!  There feet poked right through the snow, and they were not cut out for the extreme cold temperatures. Amundsen skied, brought dogs to haul his gear, and made it to the Pole and back, eating the dogs as he went. Brilliant! 

Tonight I'll go to the gym. I am making up for all the desserts I have been eating, and I have to get in shape for next week's Turkey Trot 5K. Sounds easy, right?  Well, there's a 500 foot peak we go over (twice!) on that little trot. Plus, the temps may be in the teens with subzero wind chills.  We do serious exercising in Antarctica!

Leave 'em right here

In other news, I have sorted my trash again. Recycling is big here.  McMurdo's only export is trash.  Every spring a cargo vessel drops off goodies for the next year and loads up with trash from the past year.  There are 10 categories of trash. Some are obvious, like glass and plastic, but seem arbitrary, like paper towels. There is a special category for items that may be reused, called "skua" after the pesky seagull-like birds that dive bomb anyone foolish enough to walk around with food out in the open. There are several bins that have very special labels, and they are my favorite.  The best are glitter, unicorn horns, dreams and urine soaked pants. 

Ob Hill

Intrepid explorer atop Ob Hill

Things are going relatively smoothly. We are prepared to start goopin' & gluin' tomorrow morning.

For a break and exercise to burn off the extra food I am eating, tonight I hiked to the top of Ob(servation) Hill. Ob Hill is one of my favorite hikes - short but sweet.  The 750 foot high hill towers over McMurdo Station and offers views of McMurdo, Scott Base, LDB, the mountains, Erebus.... in short, all around. Tonight the viewing was so clear that I could see open water in the far distance, and a couple of monster icebergs, which look like big blocky white buildings.

McMurdo from Ob Hill

Finally, the news that counts: Meals continue to be delicious. For lunch, in addition to the usual fresh fruit, salad, and cheese selection, there was mahi mahi and some sort of delicious chicken breast.  For dinner, a fabulous tomato soup, with an apple cobbler and carrot cake with coconut for dessert.

The melting begins: McMuddo

In other news, we are going through a spate of warm weather. The high temps are just above the freezing mark, and the skies are bluer than blue. The sun is intense, and the melting is starting.  McMurdo is becoming its alter ego: McMuddo.  Come mid-December, when the melting is mostly complete, it becomes all diesel and dust.  Sounds unpleasant, doesn't it?  Yes, but the food is great as compensation, at least this year.

Cape Armitage

...which I keep mispronouncing as "Cape Armageddon," is the promontory between McMurdo and Scott Base. It WAS the last trial in the McMurdo trail system I hadn't hiked. It is across sea ice, and in year's past was already closed (or should I say, melted away) by the time of my arrival.  But yesterday (Sunday) I played hookey from work, caught up on sleep, exercised a little, and hiked this three mile trail across the ice shelf.  It afforded a very nice view of McMurdo from the sea ice.  There was also a really nice photo op with a bunch of flags marking a fuel line. 

McMurdo from the sea ice off Cape Armitage

Today (Monday) I am back at work. We finished applying the reflective tape (except for minor spots) on the instrument frame and lowered to the floor. I am now starting to look at the data to make the last checks of the veto system, which I am responsible for. 
And now it's Tuesday. Nothing is ever easy. I got totally stuck in the first step of looking at the data, and it took until today to track down the error.  And now I am waylaid into another panel project, gluing aluminized mylar to the foam thermal insulation that surrounds the upper part of the detector.

I have been under the weather lately, recovering from a mild cold that has settled in my chest. I go around with a hacking wet cough, which makes everybody move away from me quickly. Colds spread quickly here.  But I have this friendly penguin to help me get better.

This is the life!

You know, I would like to say that being at McMurdo is a hardship. I would like to say that we sleep in Quonset huts, cook our own meals by boiling seal blubber after hunting the seals ourselves. That scurvy is just around the corner, and that I'll lose 30 pounds but gain a hardening of the soul unavailable in normal life.

But here's reality: for lunch, we have been having fresh kiwi, raspberries, and cantaloupe.  Today we had borscht soup, Swedish meatballs, vegetable tofu. For dinner, there was a special celebration of 30 days in a row with no injuries, and we had king crab legs, spaghetti, pork loin, and chicken breast. We have fresh salad, several dessert choices, and fresh breads every night. This is not a hardship. Should I complain that the bus trip to work is 45 minutes?  Should I complain that I have a roommate? That the shade on my window is not dark enough? That there is not enough bandwidth to watch Hulu? Puh-lease! This place gets nicer every time I visit. It's like going to a spa.

So I feel guilty that life is good here.  I feel like I should be telling you all this in a confessional booth and getting absolution for living so well in such a far away place.  I am surrounded by memorials for people who died here as they crossed the ice. Heck, Williams Field, one of the air strips on the Ice, is named for a Navy sailor who drowned when his tractor fell through the ice.  His body is still at the bottom of the bay.  And here I am, waltzing around in my slippers.

Tonight was very pleasant. I went to a mini-concert by one of the dining assistants (who visited our experiment last week) in the coffee bar.  I really felt a sense of community there. It was easy to strike up a conversation with the geologist sharing my table. Everyone was really enthusiastic and supportive about the fiddling.  Folks insisted that he pass around a hat for donations.

Colin fiddling in the coffee house.

Well, off to the ATM to get money to spend in one of the four bars (including the one at Scott Base) the gift shops (one here, one at Scott Base), and then to relax in the sauna (well, not really, but there is one here), then catch a movie in one of the lounges.  My roommate suggests we should get the t-shirt:  "Life is good: McMurdo."

Ta ta!

Forward progress

It's Saturday morning here.  Time for a new post. Thanks to everyone who has sent comments. It helps motivate me to write more. 

It is back to feeling like Antarctica here.  Temperatures are in the single digits (F) with wind chills in the negative teens. I don't mind the cold but the wind is wicked.  The breeze gets into every available chink in my usually-warm armor.

I have been really busy the last couple days making "forward progress" (our PIs favorite way of describing the focus of the day's activities) on the panels discussed in earlier posts. I have made my peace with them, even though we had to redrill new holes for nearly every screw.  It is just a matter of adjusting expectations.  The process was to mount the panels by placing them in the intended location and then making the best of a bad job of locating holes by drilling and tapping new ones, then applying a very shiny tape made of teflon coated silver.  This tape reflects the sunlight at float altitude, where the Sun's radiant energy is far more potent than it is at the Earth's surface after it has been filtered by the atmosphere.

Happy shiny panels

As you can see, I really put my back into my work. My job was to hold the panels up against the bottom of the instrument while Michael drilled and screwed.  The hard hats were to keep our skulls from getting ripped open if we were to scrape them up against the underside of the panels where various scraps of sheet metal were hanging down after being cut to make room for boltheads.

Today I do follow up work with the panels. Now we go and cover every screwhead with the same shiny tape.  We still have 5 side panels without tape on them. And then the instrument frame gets tapes as well.  You can see how nice and shiny the bottom is now.

Sanity check

All this effort has been keeping me so busy that I have not been keeping up this blog as faithfully as I would like.  Instead, I have been taking a little time at the end of each day to relax with my guitar.  Occasionally an impromptu jam session arises among the four guitarists out here, and it can get a little noisy in the hangar past 4:30 pm.

The CREST experiment

The CREST (Cosmic Ray Electron Synchrotron Telescope) instrument will measure the flux of electrons at very high energies, in a region that has not yet been explored.  The graph below shows the current data set and predictions for the flux of cosmic ray electrons.  Keep in mind that these electrons are stripped from their atoms in the violent places of the galaxy, such as supernova remnants (SNRs), and accelerated to near light speeds.  Electrons are special compared to atomic nuclei (what remains of the atom after you strip the electrons off it) because they are relatively light.  Imagine throwing a racquetball and a basketball towards a bunch of hanging strips of cloth. The heavier basketball will penetrate much further than the racquetball, which slows down very quickly, eventually halting. The same is true of electrons compared to nuclei. The electrons are stopped relatively quickly, and fast electrons rapidly become slow electrons.  You can see that effect in the predictions in the graph.  At right about where the data points stop (~3000 GeV in energy) there is a green dashed line that plummets towards zero.  That is a sign of electrons not penetrating very far from their source, and getting absorbed in their journey after acceleration. 

But, you may ask, what is that dashed-dot line doing there at higher energies, over 3000 GeV?  This prediction is for electrons which reach Earth from a particular SNR (Vela), which is close enough to us that electrons accelerated there to these high energies could still reach us.  The detection of electrons at these extremely high energies, which could only come from a nearby source, such as Vela, is a "smoking gun" indication of acceleration in SNRs, since the only nearby candidate sources are SNRs such as Vela.  That's science worth doing.

Note that no data points exist at these extreme energies.  The reason for that is that these energies are very difficult to measure.  The energies are greater than what we can produce on Earth in particle accelerators, such as CERN and Fermilab.  And, furthermore, if you have any familiarity with high energy physics experiments, you know the size of those instruments are huge,  like a big house.  We have to fit our instrument into space on a balloon or rocket. 

CREST principle: detect synchrotron photons from primary electron

CREST design

So how do we detect those extremely high energy electrons?  We don't go for the electron itself directly. Instead, we make use of a process called synchrotron radiation, in which the electron emits photons (particles of x-rays) as it bends in the Earth's magnetic field.  We detect the synchrotron radiation instead of the electron.  The synchrotron process is well understood, and you can take a guess at the emitting electron's energy based on the average energy of emitted x-ray photons. We identify synchrotron x-rays from the background of x-ray photons from the Sun and other sources by looking for them to come at essentially the same time and lie along a line (representing a projection of the electron's path onto the detector from above).  So CREST is an x-ray photon detector, not an electron detector, but by identifying synchrotron x-rays we can learn about the original incoming electron.