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Cut off from the world / Eric
Christian arrives
We were
greeted this morning out at
Williams Field with a total communications dropout. Upon arrival,
we had the "fine how do you do" of both our internet connection and our
phone lines cut off from the rest of the world. This was
particularly amusing since yesterday, I agreed with Bob Binns, my
advisor and our project's principal investigator, that we would have
daily conference calls at 10:00 AM to keep everyone abreast of the
issues down here on the Ice. So 10:00 rolled around and there was
no way to tell him that we could not call. We soon learned that a
satellite had malfunctioned. Kind of scary to think that a single
satellite could bring us down like that.
It's interesting being down here in a situation like
that, since we really are a totally isolated establishment. As
far as we're concerned, the whole world could disappear and we might
not know it for a really long time. Not really a very pleasant
thought to mull over. Luckily, by noon, McMurdo was back online.
The nasty weather finally began to subside a bit
today, and the clouds on Mount Erebus were quite a beautiful sight to
behold. By the afternoon, the skies were bright blue again (for
the first time in a few days) and the temperature got more reasonable.
We were able to turn on TIGER again today and let it
run for a while. Things are getting smoother and all the kinks
that we're running into are slowly working themselves out.
Tomorrow, we're supposed to begin mounting all of the telemetry
antennae onto TIGER's gondola and run some more tests to make sure that
we can transmit commands and receive data once the balloon is up.
Hopefully everything will run smoothly and it will just be a matter of
waiting for ANITA to get their electronics back together and mounted
into the gondola. Being launch-ready is only a week or two away
at this point.
It was a bit of relief today to see Dr. Eric
Christian, a physicist from NASA headquarters who used to be one of our
collaborators at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland. As a graduate student and as the only science person in
our
group down here before, it was becoming more and more difficult to keep
our group afloat. Eric has a lot experience in scientific
ballooning (this is his 15th campaign), and will be a valuable asset in
striving to be the first to declare launch-ready in the coming weeks.
Back in town, I decided to head over to a McMurdo
institution, the Burger Bar (our the "Burgah Bah" as Dave Sullivan says
with his Australian accent) over at Gallagher's, one of the bars in
McMurdo. For less than five dollars, you can get a burger and
fries and avoid the dining hall, which after a bit of time becomes a
bit repetitious. Tonight was also Bingo night, which always
brings in a large crowd, since the prizes are quite nice:
boondoggles (trips around the McMurdo vicinity to look at penguins and
things like that) or money. Since most people spend all day in
McMurdo Station, the possibility of getting out to see more is really
attractive.
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