Jan 17th – Day 18 on Ice

2 weeks at Pole… 38(ish) to go.

Weather: Has been warm and moderately windy. Clouds gave way yesterday to one of the most beautiful, cloudless days I have ever seen at Pole, but today was windy enough for snow to be blown around giving the sky a cloudy/misty look. Temperatures around -14F with a windchill down near -40F.

After a week of no flights to Pole, we got 2 in today! Nearly 30 passengers arrived on the first flight (with about 15 of those being winter-overs who were on R&R in McMurdo). Our other 3 SPT’ers also arrived after being delayed by about 1 week. Needless to say they were ready to get here!

There has been a lot of heavy machinery activity around station with plows, dozers, snow movers and snow groomers all actively moving snow. This is all to get ready for winter; digging out buildings and leveling the snow so it doesn’t pile up. Even in the 2 weeks I’ve been here we’ve had 3-4 foot snow drifts around our outhouse and the entrance to DSL.

During the past few days we have been mostly concerned with how the 3rd generator will power the station; we have docked the telescope and were not doing any observing or moving (with the fear being that in the case of a power failure during scanning, the telescope brakes will engage and cause a hard-stop… which is not good for the building structure, let alone our sensitive camera). During this time we were able to do some computer replacement and also extract about 70Tb of hard drives containing SPT’s data from last winter. We will send these north as a backup hard copy since we’ve already sent most of it north via satellite.

During the time on Gen3, we had 3 brownouts. Each time some various components of SPT went down including some computing systems and a fridge compressor. This turned out to be really good practice for me and Geoff so we could troubleshoot what happens in power outages and how to recover.

We’re back now on Gen2 for at least 3 weeks and there should be a Cat technician coming to Pole soon (or was on one of the flights today?), to work on the generators and try to get all 3 up and running without problems. As of about 5 minutes ago, we started observing again. Weather is really nice, so hopefully we get decent maps!

I took another running video, where I gave a quick tour of the facilities at Pole. It was complete crap, but hopefully I can learn the tools of the trade in video editing to provide some semi-interesting information in these videos. I still don’t know if I can reduce the resolution enough to upload them from Pole, but maybe I’ll build a bank of videos for when I get back to civilization.