One More Time Around, Milestones, and Another Penguin!: January 10, 2013

Before I woke up on Thursday morning, Super-TIGER officially passed the 2001-2 TIGER flight for 4th longest science flight from a NASA long-duration balloon. After 32 days, we're almost entirely around the continent a second time:

The big news today was that we officially got approval for a third trip around the continent. This will mean several more days of data, and a chance at the NASA LDB duration record (just under 42 days, held by the CREAM experiment). This also means that our monitoring routine in McMurdo will continue basically the same as it has been the last month.

Once we passed 32 days, we also passed another fun milestone:

It's official: @supertigerldb 's flight is now longer than William Henry Harrison's presidency! #TippecanoeAndTIGERtoo
— Ryan Murphy (@ryangoesboom) January 10, 2013

Wednesday night before our shift ended we got word that EBEX had run out of cryogens, meaning that their observations have had to stop. With BLAST and EBEX both without cryogens to cool down their detectors, we're the only payload that's still taking science data. BLAST is almost in a position to be cut down, which could happen very soon.

Thursday afternoon when I walked out to Hut Point there was one Adelie penguin hanging out on a piece of ice. The sea ice around Hut Point is really starting to break up. This penguin was lying around for a while, but eventually got up and started waddling around, looking around for something. I could hear him/her squawking for a little bit, but then it gave up and lay back down.

Sean and Thomas Arrive, and My Science Talk: January 8-9, 2013

Tuesday was another pretty typical day in McMurdo. After lunch, I went out to Hut Point to check for penguins, but ran into a couple of BLAST people that said there weren't any, so I went back and worked on my presentation for Wednesday. I then went to our Crary Lab office for a conference call with our collaborators back in the states. JohnE and I started our normal 7pm-2am shift, but were joined partway through by Thomas and Sean, who had just arrived from Christchurch. We spent the rest of the shift catching up, and had our regular shift-change call with Goddard. I got back to my room to find that Thomas was (temporarily) in my room as well.

Wednesday after lunch I ran through my Crary Lab Science Talk with Thomas and JohnE in our office, and we came up with a few changes and tweaks to improve it. I then went over to Building 155 and got a haircut, which basically ended up making my beard look even more ridiculous. I spent the rest of the afternoon making changes to my talk.

After dinner, it was time to head up to the Crary Library and get everything set up. There were maybe 20-25 people there by the time my talk started, and I think things went pretty well. There were a few trickier questions but nothing disastrous. Then, it was back to work for our regular shift.

Steve from BLAST has posted photos of trip to Castle Rock here: https://galadriel.astro.utoronto.ca/ballast/?p=6126

This is me on my way down the hill:

Penguins and Castle Rock: January 6-7, 2013

Sunday morning I was woken up as my third roommate turned on the lights and moved out of our room. Since he was only around for two days, and we were never awake and in the room at the same time, this marks the first roommate I've ever had that I never actually met.

After lunch, I walked out to Hut Point. As I was passing Discovery Hut, someone walking back told me that there were two penguins swimming around in the open water just off Hut Point. I hurried to where I could see, and then spent the next half hour or so watching the two penguins as they swam around, diving under the water, coming back up and swimming around, and generally having a fun time. It was nice to finally see penguins up close. About ten minutes after I arrived, JohnE came out to Hut Point as well, so we both got some good penguin pictures.

I then went back into town and attempted to meet up with the people from Minnesota I'd met last week that were planning to watch the Vikings/Packers game in the Coffee House Theater. Nobody was there (I was late, because PENGUINS, so they must have gone somewhere else). Instead, I watched the game and worked on my talk for Wednesday. At least I got a bunch of powerpoint slides made!

JohnE and I had dinner with some of the BLAST grad students. They had plans to head out to Castle Rock, a few miles out of McMurdo, on a hike later that night. After arranging with JohnE to cover the second half of our shift by himself, I decided to join them and brought my warm clothes over to Crary with me.

We set out for Castle Rock a little after 10:00pm McMurdo time, and stopped by the Firehouse to officially check out and get an emergency radio. Our party of five consisted of four BLAST Grad Students--Tristan, from Northwestern, and Steve, Natalie, and Laura from the University of Toronto. The Castle Rock loop starts by walking up a road in McMurdo, and climbing to the top of the road near Arrival Heights (which you can also get to by walking up along the ridge that leads to Hut Point). From there, the path is clearly marked with flags and pretty well-maintained. 

The path goes along the top of Hut Point Peninsula (which McMurdo is basically at the tip of), so we could see Sea Ice to our left and the Ross Ice Shelf (including LDB!) to our right as we walked along the path. Eventually, we caught our first glimpse of Castle Rock out of the clouds. 

On this part of the loop, Castle Rock is about three miles from the top of the hill. We made pretty good time, and made it to the base of the rock without any problems.

The trail we were on runs alongside the east side of the rock, but the best place to climb (also, the place with a rope) is on the north side. We made our way up around the rock on a small trail near the edge of the rock.

Eventually, we got to a point where it was time to start heading upwards.

The climb up wasn't terribly hard, but I imagine it would be pretty bad if snow and ice were involved. Eventually, we reached the top, and were treated to a very nice view of Mt. Erebus.

We also were sure to stay away from the edge, since the way straight down looked like this:

Once we'd had a nice break at the top and were ready to move on, we carefully climbed down the rock (this is where the emergency rope became very useful). 

Then, it was time for the fun part to begin! From Castle Rock, the trail heads downhill to the Ice Shelf. This is basically the only place around McMurdo where people can go skiing or snowboarding, but we opted for a much more fun form of transportation downhill: cafeteria trays.

No trays were harmed in the making of this photo.

Sledding downhill is a lot of fun, and we were able to get going pretty fast. The initial bit near Castle Rock was good, but the slope of the trail levels out a bit soon afterwards. Towards the end, however, there's some really good downhill sledding. Unfortunately, I missed out on the best parts, since I was unable to obey Rule #1 of tray sledding (hold on to your tray!) and my sled made it to the bottom of the hill about ten minutes before I did. Oh well.

Once we made it to the bottom, the way back wasn't particularly exciting. We walked along the rest of the hiking path until it met up with the main road on the ice shelf. This is the road we would take to work out at LDB every day, and also serves the airport at Pegasus Field. We saw a Delta loaded up with pallets of luggage heading for the airport on our way in.

Eventually, we reached the transition near Scott Base, and from there it was just a matter of getting up the Scott Base hill and back into McMurdo. We returned to town around 3:15am, having hiked a little under 10 miles. After a snack and some hot chocolate, I went to sleep.

After lunch on Monday, I had started doing laundry when JohnE told me that he'd been out to Hut Point and that there were a couple of penguins lying around out there. I hurried out there, and climbed up the path from Discovery Hut to Vince's Cross, right at the tip of Hut Point. Unexpectedly, I found my self face-to-face with a Skua, about five feet ahead of me just sitting on the path. 

Since the official rule is that if you're close enough to an animal that it's reacting to you, you're too close, I started to slowly back away. The Skua didn't seem to care one way or another that I was there, so I was able to make it to the top of Hut Point on the other path. There, as promised, were two penguins just lying around on a piece of sea ice. Since they seemed to be taking a nap, and it was really windy, I just took a couple of photos and went back inside.

Otherwise, Monday wasn't too exciting. BLAST, which has a limited supply of liquid helium on board, just ran out, meaning that basically their scientific observations are done (almost right on schedule). They'll basically wait until the payload is in a good spot for recovery before cutting down. All but one member of the BLAST team is leaving in the next day or two, as soon as they get a flight out. Sean and Thomas have arrived safely in Christchurch, and will hopefully arrive here in McMurdo sometime tomorrow. 

Ballast Away! and Internet Outage: January 4-5, 2012

I was just about to start writing here on Friday night, but then the internet stopped working here. It soon emerged that we were in a "continent-wide" internet outage that lasted several hours, from the middle of our shift until we were done with our shift, packed up, and literally about to walk out of the door. Nothing new happened with the payload while we were unable to monitor, so that was a good sign.

Friday, we dropped 270lbs (~120kg) of ballast from the payload. If we'd had a balloon that leaked and progressively lost significant altitude (like the 2001 TIGER flight), this ballast would have been very useful in maintaining our normal altitude. Luckily, our balloon this flight is performing great, so dropping the ballast just gives us a little extra boost, and a little bit more data. Since the Galactic Cosmic Rays we're looking for can interact with the atmosphere before reaching our instrument, it makes sense to have as little atmosphere above us as possible, so a boost in altitude is very welcome.

It's pretty clear when we actually dropped the ballast:

Saturday was another relatively uneventful day. I went out to Hut Point to check for penguins (there were none) and then spent the afternoon in our office working on my presentation for the talk about Super-TIGER I'm giving on Wednesday.



Sean and Thomas are on their way down to the Ice for the second time this season. They're coming back to do the recovery of the instrument, whenever our flight gets terminated. Right now they should be on the plane from L.A. to Sydney, and are scheduled to arrive here in McMurdo sometime next Tuesday.

Nothing Exciting Happens: January 3, 2012

Thursday was another routine day. I wandered out to Hut Point to check for penguins, but otherwise there wasn't too much going on.

The weather's been relatively warm, which is causing problems for the ice runway. Flights off-continent were supposed to resume Wednesday, but so far none have actually left. This is frustrating for the BLAST, EBEX, and CSBF people who had been planning on leaving soon, especially those that got as far as waiting around at the airfield all day today.

Last night Tristan from BLAST came to take photos of the Super-TIGER office, since some CSBF people had come by and taken photos of the EBEX and BLAST offices earlier.

Photo by Tristan Matthews

Not-so-lazy Seals: January 2, 2012

Wednesday was a pretty routine day in McMurdo. I didn't get a ton of sleep (since I had to watch my alma mater's football team with their first postseason game since 1949), but still spent most of the afternoon hiking around McMurdo. I went out to Hut Point to check for penguins, as usual. There were no penguins today, but I did arrive just as one of the seals that was lying around actually got up and moved, and dove into the water. I didn't get my camera out in time to catch that, but I did get a photo a split-second late.

Luckily, the seal re-surfaced soon afterwards and I was able to watch it swim around for a while before it dove deeper to go eat (I assume).

Otherwise, I watched the other seals at Hut Point for a while, but none of them felt like waking up.

I then went around the Observation Hill loop again and stopped for a rest near the other place that seals tend to congregate, near the trail at the southernmost tip of Ross Island. There wasn't much excitement there, but if you sit very still you can hear the seals breathing and snoring as they nap in the sun. I also saw a skua come and land and then hang out for a while.

Otherwise, our monitoring shift has so far been unexciting. After 24+ days of flight, we're a bit less than halfway around on our second revolution, and have sent down over 32 million events. Many of those will have to be removed because of particles interacting and decaying within the instrument, but it looks like we're getting a lot of very good data down.

New Years in Antarctica, Discovery Hut, and Icestock: December 31, 2012 - January 1, 2013

New Years Eve 2012 was a pretty busy day around McMurdo. I started off by watching (American) football in the lounge of our dorm. Shortly after the Minnesota Vikings finished defeating the Green Bay Packers, JohnE and I went out to Hut Point for a tour of Discovery Hut.

Discovery Hut was originally built by Robert F. Scott's Discovery Expedition in 1902. At that time, it was used as an on-shore work and storage area. The hut stays pretty cold all the time, so instead of living in it the Discovery expedition stayed aboard their ship (Discovery), which was frozen in ice in the bay next to McMurdo at the time.

The hut was also used by subsequent expeditions headed by Ernest Shackleton (1907-09, 1914-17) and Scott (1910-1913) as a shelter and living space that was much further south than their main headquarters. 

Inside the hut are stores of food and equipment left behind by these early expeditions. There are also empty boxes left behind that are well-marked and very well preserved.





The whole hut smells like hay, for some reason.



There is also nearly 100-year-old seal meat and blubber that's been sitting in a corner since the last time the hut was occupied.

There are clothes and other pieces of equipment left lying around as well.




In general, the hut is basically unchanged since the last party that was using it left in 1917. Access is restricted (only a few people could be inside at a given time) and everything is kept well-preserved by the fact that the temperature never gets above freezing inside the hut.



After finishing up the hut tour and checking to see if there were any penguins hanging around (there weren't), we went back in to town.

At 4:30pm, I headed out to the McMurdo Station sign behind the dorms, answering the call from this poster in the dining hall:



There were about 20 Minnesotans that came out, and we took a few group photos with the McMurdo sign before going in to the lounge of the dorm next door and talking for a bit. Since the Vikings and Packers are facing each other again next week, this time in the playoffs, we made plans to reserve the Coffee House movie theater for the game next Sunday (McMurdo time). It works out really nice that the game is at a time and day that everyone will be free, so it sounds like there will be a decent crowd there.



Starting at 4pm, the annual Icestock music festival was held in the space between Building 155 (home to the dining hall and shop) and the gym. They had a wide variety of bands that went up and played music from 4pm until 1am, as well as a couple of smaller temporary buildings where coffee, hot dogs, and (we missed this part) chili from the McMurdo chili cook-off were available.

We still had to monitor the payload during our regular 7pm-2am shift, but we did get to be outside at Icestock for the countdown to the new year. It was kind of weird counting down to the new year when everything was so bright outside, but McMurdo got 2013 off to a good start.

New Year's Day wasn't particularly exciting. I slept in pretty late and then mostly stayed inside and read for most of the day. With BLAST and EBEX now launched, most of the CSBF crew is leaving McMurdo to head back to the states later this week, leaving only the balloon group monitoring and recovery crews behind.