Friday 22nd
January
From
Michael Burton.....
What
a difference a day makes in the weather. From a series of
beautiful sunny days we have now changed to about the worst
that the weather brings at Pole. As usual it is due the incursion
of coastal weather patterns, bringing 'warm' moist air inland.
In fact its only -23C now, but with a wind speed of upto 30
knots, the wind chill brings it below -50C! Visibility is
minimal and you have to keep sight of the flags as you struggle
the km between the Dome and the Dark Sector on the way to
and from work. Several flights were scheduled today, 2 even
made it off the ice at McMurdo, but got to Pole, flew around
overhead for an hour hoping there might be a break in the
clouds for a minute to land, and then just had to turn around
and make the 3 hour trek back to McMurdo. In the second flight
were a bunch of ASA admin-types who were here to conduct a
meeting about redeployment back to civilisation at the end
of the season. The meetings now cancelled, and, I guess, so
is redeployment!
However
bad weather doesn't stop us Polies making progress on our
experiments! The AGO crew (Ron Rainbow and Joe) were hard
at it in our AASTO giving it its annual service. They found
what they think is the source of the dreaded freon leak, a
cracked swage-lock fitting for the inlet pipe, and replaced
it. They hooked up the external propane tanks, fired them
up, and it is now nice and toasty inside the AASTO - perhaps
too toasty indeed! A glitch with the recording of the health
and safety data has some erroneous figures coming out of the
Argos satellite into the www site at Augsburg where you can
see how all the AGO's are doing across the plateau (space.Augsburg.edu)
but our local expert on wiring, Mark Tomah, reckons he can
fix it once the AGO crew are gone!
The
trench Matt & Daniel dug yesterday has, unfortunately,
filled in before they got around to putting the cable in,
so they will have to re-dig tomorrow. The webcam, now its
been sheathed in aluminium foil to stop it getting too hot,
seems to have settled down to the thermostatted temperature
of +15C now the Sun is invisible! Even some frost started
appearing inside the plexi-dome, though equally quickly had
disappeared when I looked again a few hours later. The great
webcam movie continues to grow apace, though I felt the need
to remove the sunglasses from the eyepiece given the conditions,
though anyone looking in over the web will barely see anything
right now! One benefit of the weather is that the size of
the image files produced is reduced quite considerably, as
there is now barely any dynamic range in the pictures!
Matt,
Al H and myself talked some science tonight, going over a
couple of the many (!) papers we have / are going to write
about the various data sets we are assembling. Andre we might
now want some more input on the IRPS paper, by the way! Then
I discovered I had made a subtle error in the various sensitivity
calculations I'd been doing, so now have to restart them again!
I dont think the difference will be huge, but its always annoying
when this happens!
The
bad news is with Abu. The PZT still isn't here, coming within
a (vertical) kilometre of the Pole before heading back to
McMurdo. And Abu really isn't cooling down the way its expected,
though is slowly grinding down to cryogenic temperatures.
Its really too early to say whether we will actually have
a useable instrument for the season, I'm afraid, though we
all have our fingers crossed. Some of the other telescopes
make progress. AST/RO (the sub-mm one) has opened its covers
to have a peak at the clouds. SPARO, a sub-mm polarimeter,
has been placed at the focus of the Viper telescope, after
some drastic redesign of the telescope optics when it was
found that the secondary mirror was vignetting half the field
of view of the instrument (woops!). However Liquid Helium
supplies are low at the moment, and unless some more arrives
in the next 3 days both AST/RO and SPARO are going to warm
up!
The
station so far is 60 flights short of getting enough fuel
to last the winter. The program is way behind schedule due
to the delay in opening, mainly due to bad weather. Tomorrow
7 flights are scheduled in, mostly fuel tankers, and will
make it #200 for the season. But there are of order 100 more
flights needed before station close in just over a month.
The French adventurers are still with us after 12 days! Apparantly
a Herc flight with fuel finally reached Patriot Hills, so
that a Twin Otter will now be able to slowly make its way
from there to the Pole if the weather clears up. And the Kiwi
"Ice-trek" team (with Peter Hillary, son of the
famous Sir Edmund) still remains about a week away from Pole.
They were about a week away when I left Christchurch, so they
are making *very* slow progress! As for the Dutch paragliders
who left a week ago, no word. We're presuming they'll be calling
for "help" soon and wait around to be picked up
by the Adventure Network people, once they find enough fuel
to pick up the French.......
So
its all go at the moment on the Antarctic Plateau!
Michael
 
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