Jan 14th – Day 15 on Ice

Weather: Sunny, warm, windy. Temps around -14F, windchill -35F.

Today was a beautiful day. Clear blue skies and lots of sun! We spent most of today learning about the SPT computing systems and teaching the other winterover about the readout electronics and hardware. I think we scared him a little after we looked at the code that runs the automatic fridge cycling and readout tuning. Observing has been going smoothly and we haven’t had any unexpected errors.

Tomorrow morning, the station will be switching generators for annual maintenance. There are 3 generators on station; gen 1, 2, and 3; gen2 is the golden boy, which usually runs without giving too many problems but just needs it’s annual tune-up as far as I understand it. There have been some problems with gen3 in the past, causing power ‘burps’ and brownouts of some of our electronics so we are being cautious and halting observing tomorrow for a while while they switch over to gen3. They seemed to have solved some of the problems with gen3 so hopefully things will go smoothly and we can start observing again by afternoon, but this also gives us a chance to dock and get up into the receiver cabin; which Geoff has never seen.

In other news, Sauna Sunday was a success! We didn’t do a Pole run but it was pretty warm out and not very windy, so the mini outdoor cycles were nice and comfy.

Something that really sums up life at Pole (or at least my life at Pole) are the coffee pots, which often run out at any time of day, and are labeled ‘Regular’ or ‘Strong’… no decaf!

We hope for some flights to come in tomorrow and bring our other 3 SPTers from McMurdo. Their flight was canceled today, even though the weather at Pole was beautiful… I think they claimed it was a maintenance issue, though I had heard that the weather was pretty crappy in McM.