PhD student Jessie Christiansen at the South Pole

In January of 2005 I and another UNSW student, undergraduate Colin Bonner, journeyed to the South Pole for purposes astrophysical. The NASA Ames Research Centre and the UNSW Department of Astrophysics had collaborated on a project known as Vulcan South. The aim of this project was to discover extrasolar planets by means of detecting and monitoring their eclipses of their host stars. Some maintenance and upgrades were required over the summer of 2004/2005, so Colin and I were dispatched for two weeks to one of the most isolated places on Earth. Two of the project members from NASA Ames joined us in New Zealand, en route to Antarctica.

It was physically very demanding – not just because of the temperature which reached -57C while we were there, but the dryness and the altitude also added up to an inhospitable environment. We acclimatised after a few days though, then had our “hero” shots taken at the Pole itself, and got down to work. We upgraded the network of computers that were supposed to run the project in the absence of humans over the long Antarctic winter night. The idea was to make the project almost entirely autonomous in the end.

We also reinstalled the CCD camera which had been sent back to the US at the start of the summer for repairs. Afterwards, we had to rebalance the telescope, which suddenly appeared to have less mass in the back end, where the camera was located, than it had had before the camera was removed. We were worried that they had sent us back less camera than we had sent them! However, we successfully took some images and demonstrated that the system was working to some extent. Eventually though we did have to leave and fly back to Sydney, to wait and see if we had succeeded in getting the project running!

Jessie Christiansen