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TIGER on the air at Williams Field
The National Scientific Balloon Facility
sure has had their share of unlucky problems so far. It hasn't
been their fault at all. At first, it was taking them a lot
longer than they had planned to get their instruments here and
unpacked. One crate (that was carrying lots of important
hardware) even got delayed on the way, which made it harder for them to
get ready as fast as the scientific projects were getting ready.
With two payloads wanting to be the first to fly, things have been
moving so much faster. We are already about 10 days ahead of
where we were the last time we were down here for a balloon campaign.
Matters got worse for NSBF today when a hard drive
on one of their telemetry system machines died. The incident
precipitated a number of other crashes this morning, too.
Needless to say, it delayed our line-of-sight telemetry testing.
Drew and his crew worked hard over the course of the day, getting a
replacement hard drive and getting their systems back on line by about
4:00 PM.
One of their technicians, Scott, was able to connect
us and get us up and running before we left, which was really quite
impressive once all was said and done. So just as we left, TIGER
went wireless. We were able transmit commands from their system
over in the TM shed, and receive commands back with the only delay
begin a cable that I had plugged in the wrong place. Tomorrow, we
are going to be offline, however, since TRACER is going to be testing
the TDRSS satellite system. You have to reserve time on of the
satellites and wait for it to get over the horizon before making use of
it. During flight, it is only really possible to send commands
and receive data from these satellites for about 10 minutes every
hour. For this reason, our onboard computer constantly exercises
the instrument automatically.
This evening, Dana and I met up with our two
friends, Tony Hansen and Jeff Blair who are testing web cameras of
various sorts in the McMurdo area this season, in hopes of being able
to encourage science groups to make use of them. Tonight, they
were testing a watertight chamber (that will eventually house a camera)
for leaks in a dive hut down on the "beach" below the Crary Lab.
It was refreshing to see something different, and to make the adventure
even better, there were four gigantic seals basking near the hut.
Seals often congregate near dive huts, making use of the holes that
people carve in the ice to get up and into the sun. Here are some
pictures.
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