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.