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A day in MacTown
Today we all
congratulated ourselves on a
good hangtest with a day off. I had hoped to climb Observation
Hill this evening to get some more pictures to put up, but alas,
although the idea was fine, the effort required would have conflicted
quite a bit with my relaxation program for the day. I spent most
of the day in the Crary Library monitoring TIGER and looking for
whopper events. In the afternoon, the NSBF guys needed to switch
out our line-of-sight telemetry receivers for the testing ones.
On the ground, the TIGER and TRACER instruments send and receive
line-of-sight commands on different frequencies from one another, so
there is no problem with both groups working in tandem. During
flight, however, transmissions to and from the payloads will be on the
same frequency. This will not be a problem since the first
payload up will run over LOS for only about a day and a half before
moving too far away (and hence into TDRSS territory). The second
payload can then be launched and transmit without the first payload
interfering.
At dinner I saw a good friend from my last time down
on the Ice, John "Jeb" Barrett. Jeb is from Dartmouth College
and studies nematodes (a small worm-like organism, as I understand it)
in the Dry Valleys near McMurdo Station. Some of my best memories
from my last time here were hanging out with Jeb and the other nematode
researchers here and in Christchurch. So, it's really great to
see him again.
After dinner, I got involved in something totally
different from my normal day-to-day routine around town. One of
my friends is considering doing a performance of the musical Into the Woods sometime in
January. Upon learning that they were in dire need of someone
with musical experience to help train their vocalists and play piano, I
told him that I would be happy to help out. In college, I worked
on and musically directed a number of musicals and it was always great
fun. So at about 7:30 PM, I went up to the music room and spent
about an hour going through some vocal exercises with about 10 of the
actors. It's nice to bout and doing something a little different
with the folks in town.
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