all photos
[1/9(Mo) McMurdo til Tuesday :]
12:00 Woke up. Got an email saying my flight out of McMurdo Station is scheduled for Tuesday the 17th -- good news!! because that means I get to explore McMurdo for 3 nights instead of 2! :) :)
2pm My neck/shoulders and upper back still hurt, so I wrote the station therapist for some advice. The sky was partially clear finally, so I tried to find a star, but the clouds were still too thick... :( I started putting the absorber inside the 2nd groundshield.
9pm Tried to test a spare power supply that takes 208 V AC input. Since our building so far has only single-phase 115 V outlets, John suggested using the "hot" terminal from 2 different outlet circuits (phase differing by 120 degrees) to get 2-phase 208 V. It worked :)
7am I stayed up to make sure I make it to the teleconference, and it's finally time... but the satellite connection was so poor that we could hardly talk... :(
8am Back to station to sleep.
[1/10(Tu) Keep in touch]
1pm Woke up just in time for the lunch meeting. Reinforced the gluing on my calibrator, and finished gluing the absorber and the foam on the 2nd groundshield.
0:00 Started a team discussion on what to do about the lower groundshield.
2am Serena invited me to connect at SpaceAlumni.com, so I went there and said hello to a bunch of old space explorer friends.
5am Since the US Antarctic Program Photo Gallery solicited contributions, selected and submitted 33 photos.
7am The sky seemed to clear up a bit, but the weather seem to always go bad by the time I point the telescope for a star, and I was so tired that I just went back to the station to sleep.
[1/11(We) Heartsaver]
2pm Woke up too late for the lunch meeting! Also, the sky had gotten cloudy already :( Worked on the lower groundshield.
6-9pm I took the Hearsaver AED course to learn CPR and how to use this device that can apply electrical shock on heart that stopped pumping. I was good because I didn't know what an AED was before.
3am Heard back from Robert the satellite operator offering to have us visit around 9am. I was very tired so thought that's very early, but told Denis and Cynthia to wake me up if they're up for it.
6am Back to station to sleep.
[1/12(Th) Satellite antenna!]
8:00 Denis called me to go see the satellite antenna! I was very sleepy but woke up to go. We walked to the white sphere ~1.5 km away; it was very windy and cold. We entered the building and only Robert was there. He's the only one responsible for the entire satellite communcations for the South Pole! He showed us the room-full of instruments, but I was too sleepy to digest his explanations with lots of technical jargons. It was super interesting, so unfortunate that I was so sleepy after only 2 hours of sleep. Dneis was also very tired... Robert then showed us the big antenna dish inside the spherical wind shelter. The GOES satellite was up; Robert said he
[1/13(Fr) Last Day]
8am Woke up and went to the lab even though I was pretty
[1/14(Sa) Last Minute]
11am Woke up in a quiet lab. When I checked email it turned out that Rolf had written me back offering to show me the "Utility Tunnel" at 9am. I thought he must've gone already for his tunnel check, but called him anyways -- turns out he was kindly waiting for me :)
11:30 I finished up everything in the lab and went back to the station.
12:00 I went to the store for last minute gifts, then to lunch to meet Rolf.
1am Rolf took me to the Utility Tunnel. The station maintenance peopple check this tunnel every day for leaks, and this week is Rolf's turn. It was a hole in the middle of the dome. It was narrower and not as cold as the Ice Tunnel. He told me that water is pumped from rodwell, and them our sewage is poured down to fill the space. Some parts had leaked sewage and glycol (fuel for heating the station) and water frozen on the floor. He said after the Dome closes this winter, all this will be dug out.
1:30pm We came out of the tunnel. I went to the berthing (dormitory) that
3pm Out my room window I saw my plane land, so I quickly gathered everything and headed out. Just before exiting the station, I went to see the Growth Chamber -- i should've taken a better look at it long ago. Then I called the lab to say goodbye to Cynthia and Ki Won. On my way out to the plane, the shuttle van stopped by me and the construction guys in it including the foreman Dan said bye to me. It was nice working with them. When I approached the plane, I saw lots of incoming passengers, so I looked for our Principal Investigator Andrew. Then I saw John, Darren, and Denis greeting him. It was good to see Andrew at least for a few minutes at the Pole. In the noise of the propeller plane, we had goodbye handshakes. I had to wait for ~20 minutes while the station pumped fuel from the plane, and all the cargos were loaded into the plane. There are only 3 passengers on this flight.
3:45pm Just took off on LC-130. This plane is full of cargos, with quite a bit of snow still on it. On the first take-off try heading upwind, it stopped accelerating after ~15 seconds. I guess it couldn't go fast enough even though a tractor was trying to pack the snow on the skiwaqy before our take-off. I was hoping to take an aerial photo of our telescope, but oh well. On the 2nd try heading downwind, I though it might fail again because it felt like it was running almost a minute before finally coming off the ground. After a few minutes the plane came out of the thick clouds. Looks like this whole area is overcast... I was looking forwarding to watching the Antarctic terrain, but I'm writing this instead, and will probably go to sleep soon since I'm very sleepy...
Q(Kathleen). What are the biggest challenges?
=)
[1/15(Mo) Icebreaker]