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.