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.

Cookie day!

I was glad to learn today that cookie Wednesday is still alive and well at McMurdo! At lunch I had a chocolate chip, molasses, oatmeal raisin currant, and mint chocolate.  Mmmm....  I always looked forward to Wednesday during my previous visit.

LDB galley

Inside the LDB galley

Challenge for my 220 class: Complete the following sentence in the style of Dr Nutter.  "Cookies are ____  _____"  (Two words).  Er, maybe it's not such a challenge after all.

In other news, I started applying expensive silver teflon tape to those horrible panels-that-used-to-have-holes-in-the-wrong-places-and-now-have-holes-of-various-shapes-in-more-or-less-the-correct-places.  That process is going much better than the hole-making/rearranging/mutilation.

Dinner in the McMurdo cafeteria

For my Cincinnati friends, you should know that I had Cincinnati style chili last night here at McMurdo. Chef tells me that there was chocolate and cinnamon in it, as there should be.  I found it BETTER than both Skyline and Goldstar.  Which isn't saying much, really, since I am not a fan of either. But I could have had seconds on the stuff last night if I wasn't too busy eating the purple velcet cake dessert.

I should rename this post "More thoughts about buildings and food. Or rather, just food."