Monday, December 8, 2014

Another day of errands, and our 2-year launch anniversary: December 9, 2014

I woke up Tuesday morning and immediately checked the CSBF website and COSI Facebook page to see how things were going. I could see COSI on the launch vehicle but not yet rolled out to the launch pad, so I figured I had plenty of time before they would launch and went off to breakfast. After breakfast, I found out that the upper atmosphere winds weren't right for a launch, so things were called off, with a potential opportunity coming on Thursday.

In McMurdo, Thomas and I went through the recovery tools and sorted out ones we likely won't end up using and started weighing the various bags that we'll be taking to the field. We carried these over to our containers once we had finished, and then went once again to the BFC to look at the tool selection they have there. After grabbing another box of stuff from the BFC, we found Sean and caught the shuttle out to LDB for lunch and a couple of errands. When we got to LDB the smell of cooking meat (burger day. It's a harsh continent.) told us we had made the correct choice. Today was also the two-year anniversary of the SuperTIGER launch, so it was cool to be out at the LDB facility today (even though we actually launched miles away).

We eventually went back into town and got back to work with the tools. The past couple of days have been warm here (almost above freezing), so a lot of snow has been melting. This has turned most of the roads in McMurdo into mud puddles, and left us with a half-inch deep puddle in front of our shipping containers. Thomas and I stopped by building 175 to talk to James about the plan for getting everything in the field, and then we went to the Science Support Center (SSC) to talk about the generator we'll be bringing into the field. We'll have a solar power system that James thinks should be more than enough to power the camp, but the power tools we'll bring with will need a generator. We checked out a more powerful (and lighter) generator than the one we had requested, and tomorrow we'll go back to test it to make sure it can power the tools we need it to without problems. We then went and talked to Scott Battion again to try to find the list of tools that we got from the BFC last year. After that, we took a break before dinner, and that's about it. I'm really tired today for some reason, so I'll probably go to sleep early tonight.

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