Friday 25th
January
From
John Storey.....
 Abba?
What are they trying to do! This morning's breakfast music
was clearly not designed to get the day off to a good start.
Fortunately by lunchtime the kitchen staff had moved onto
new-wave grunge sung in German - not exactly art but definitely
an improvement. By dinner we were back to Hendrix and Joplin
- perhaps the station manager had had words with the cooks
about the Abba thing.
The
Stirling engine is purring sweetly, as we log data every 120
seconds into a file to check everything is OK. While the engine
may consider this to be something of an invasion of its privacy,
it does remind me of the process I had to go through before
I could be declared medically fit for travel to Antarctica.
It seems that every one of my bodily functions was subjected
to scrutiny in the most exacting detail and written down in
a file, in much the same way as we are now doing to the Stirling
engine. At least my results were not broadcast all over the
world (or so I believe).
Duane
left just after lunch. In the end he coped extremely well
with the transition from metric measurements to things American,
and by the time he left could distinguish between a 4/40 thread
and a 6/32 thread from a distance of 10 paces. For me, using
American nuts and bolts brings back nostalgic memories of
the four happy years I spent as a postdoc in Berkeley in the
late seventies. My only problem now is that I can't pick up
a handful of 6/32 bolts without thinking of the song "Horror
Movie" by the seventies Australian band "Skyhooks".
(Remember how it finishes - "Horror movie, right there
on my TV; horror movie: it's the six/thirty-twos")
Just
after lunch Paolo Calisse called me from the Italian station
of Terra Nova Bay via HF SSB radio. This time the signal was
loud and clear, and we were able to wrap up the details of
this year's campaign. Paolo is on his way home after a very
successful couple of weeks at Dome C. Talking on HF radio
is also a nostalgic experience for me. You see, once upon
a time there was no Internet...
Duane's
final task this morning was to find a sheet of Lucite (Perspex
to our British readers; Plexiglas to the Americans; polymethyl-methacrylate
to our Chemists) to put over Jim Lovell's signature on the
wall of the AASTO before it gets damaged. Two years ago, Lovell
(of Apollo 13 fame) was visiting the South Pole intending
to spend just a few hours here. However bad weather at his
return base meant he had to spend several days with us, along
with Owen Garriot (of Skylab fame). Fox Television decided
to conduct an interview with Lovell via Iridium phone and,
since the only web-camera at South Pole was out at the AASTO,
it became an impromptu outside-broadcast studio. Lovell was
kind enough to autograph our wall before he left, and the
signature is now preserved for posterity.
In
terms of scientific achievement, today was a "slow"
day. The Supervisor computer did not work despite several
hours of patient re-soldering of connectors, and was lucky
to escape without an ice-axe through its CPU. We have gone
back to using our original Supervisor, which unfortunately
uses a floppy disk as its one and only storage medium. If
I have time after all the other jobs are done I might have
another go at finding a machine that can read our Flash disk.
The station is definitely starting to wind down, and a lot
of time is taken up sorting through junk and getting equipment
ready for the winter. I will be leaving on Monday, and there's
a lot still to do.
 
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