Yuki @ South Pole

[12/1(Sa) 1st liquid helium fill myself]

This morning I worked more on the analysis of the most recent measurements and the data were looking pretty promising :)

1PM Today is the first time filling liquid helium into our telescope without having Denis around. Last night while I was falling asleep in bed, I went over all the steps for this. Even though I was thinking about it half asleep, surprisingly it made me feel more ready today. While filling liquid nitrogen, I updated the step-by-step procedure. The cryogenics technician Chris, who delivers liquid nitrogen and helium for us, is interested in the filling process, so he helped me with some steps that reduces the loss of helium -- it's apparently getting more expensive. We use ~100 L of liquid helium, which probably cost $100~$1000 excluding the cost of transport to here. Anyways, the fill went very well, and I got a better efficiency (72%) than before.

8PM The station showed films from the past annual South Pole International Film Festival to inspire people for this year. They showed one from our 1st year (2 years ago) when Cynthia, Kiwon, Denis, and I were featured lip singing and acting out the "Particle Man" song -- it was better done than I had remembered :)

[12/2(Su) CPR certified :]

1-4PM Did a CPR amd heart saver AED (automated external defibrillator) training. When you don't practice, it's so easy to forget the procedure!

4PM Since it's Sunday and there won't be as many people walking about outside the station, I decided it won't be as embarrasing to ski out to the lab again. I hope to practice a lot, and maybe someday it'll get faster than walking...

We're finishing up our calibration measurements with our mast on the other building, so I moved around a lot of heavy stuff and snow to clear a space for laying down the mast. We also have a shorter mast on our building, and John and I brought it down. It's still heavy, and my arm almost got pinched between the mast components when it came down... I need to be more cautious!!

John and I walked back to catch dinner and the science lecture. John still had a lot to do before leaving tomorrow, so I decided in my mind that I'll help him tonight after the lecture. But during the lecture, I got very sleepy and decided I'd better not help him when my brain is so sleepy; it's better to help out after waking up tomorrow.

[12/3(Mo) Bye John!]

From today I start running the telescope on a regular schedule of 2-day cycles. I started recyling the refrigerator inside the telescope at exactly 23:00 local sidereal time (which is in reference to the universe we're observing, not the Sun) to cool the detectors in time for 2 days of observations. 23:00 LST is around 10am now, but because the sidereal time is 4 minutes faster per day, I'll have to recycle the refrigerator around 8am by the end of the month. To start observing the sky, we took off the big mirror from the top of the telescope. I was hoping to do the star pointing procedure to establish exactly where the telescope is pointing, but the sky was too cloudy for that.

After lunch, as I was filling liquid nitrogen, the station's Science Corrdinator brought 2 day-visitors from McMurdo Station to our telescope and I gave them a brief introduction.

4PM Started the new observation schedule that I put together with help of Denis. Since this schedule has never been tested before, I monitored the telescope carefully to make sure it's doing the right thing. So far so good.

8PM There was a special science lecture about global climate change, so I went back to the station. The speaker Ken turned out to be one of the visitors to our telescope earlier today. He's been trained by Al Gore to give these presentations, and it was very good. Dave and Laurie, the carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere has definitely increased unnaturally over the past few decades!

9:30PM Now it was time for John to leave, with 3 others including Ken. We talkd about next year, when we will come back to do the final calibration measurements and take down our telescope for Caltech's next telescope, called BICEP2. If BICEP2 is somehow not ready for next year, we will probably continue running our current telescope for another year. I was happy to realize that I can probably come to the South Pole again next year -- coming here never gets old for me. We also talked a little about when i could graduate. John said "come work with us on BICEP2"; not sure how serious he was, but I appreciate his encouraging comments. As his plane started taxing, i felt slightly more alone but at the same time excited about the upcoming challenge (ok ok, it's not such a big challenge! but definitely one that takes some responsibility :).

[12/4(Tu) On my own]

Technically, I didn't even have to go out to the lab today because I can monitor and do everything from the station, but I was anxious to see and listen to the telescope directly to make sure it's doing fine. Walking toward the lab, it felt much colder than usual, even though the temperature was supposed to be normal. I thought, maybe this is what it feels like to be on my own... :)

I put a recharged battery on the Iridium pager and checked it out -- I think it's supposed to alert me whenever any parameters on the telescope goes beyond certain thresholds. I wasn't sure exactly how it's set up, but there was an alarm feature, so I set it to 6AM to alert me before tomorrow's 7AM teleconference.

10AM The phone rang and it was Denis -- he was back in Pasadena, and I heard Irina say "Privet Yuki!" in the background :) I was a little tired at the time, but it was nice to hear from him.

Today I updated the observation logs and prepared and sent a weekly report to the team in time for tomorrow's teleconference meeting.

5:30-6:30PM Now that I can pretty much be on my own schedule, I went to a pilates class -- my first proper exercise since I got here! Turns out Hilary from my Trauma Team is the instructor. It was very good.

7:00-8:40PM After a quick dinner, I decided to also play a little bit of volleyball -- maybe just a half hour. It was so fun that I didn't feel tired and kept playing till the end. I got to meet some new non-scientist people, so it was great. There's a station-wide fitness challenge starting this week; I don't expect to come anywhere close to winning, but i logged 160 minutes today for my record.

9PM I went to bed early to make sure I wake up well in advance of the telesconference tomorrow.

[12/5(We) Crash, yoga, trauma]

6AM I had my alarm set to something like 4AM to wake up in time to do some data analysis before the teleconference, but I was awakened by an unusual alarm sound -- it was my backup alarm on the pager. I was surprised to find that it was already 6AM! I remember hitting the snooze on my regular vibrating alarm about 2 times, but my it is set to repeat every 20 minutes, so maybe I didn't even hear/feel it since 4AM! It must be yesterday's exercise -- I remembered in previous years sleeping much longer than expected after exercises near the beginning of the season at this high-altitude station.

Anyways, what's nice about here is that going outside to the bright and cold often wakes you up.

7-8AM I made it to the lab and called in to the teleconference.

9AM I noticed that the telescope had stopped moving and all the numbers in the monitor had been frozen! I quickly sent a "Caltech, we have a problem" email to John and Denis, and then found out that the telescope control computer had crashed. I was relieved that it was nothing more complicated and troublesome. It had crashed 2 weeks ago for unknown reason and we were planning to replace it with a backup if it crashed again. So it decided to crash right after everybody else left. The crew coming in January knows much more about computers, so we plan to replace this computer then. I just rebooted and checked the tempertures and stuff.

10AM The sky was too hazy for star pointing calibration, but I tried pointing toward a star and it was visible. The little optical side telescope that I was responsible for is able to see stars even in the daylight :) But then it became way too cloudy to continue so I gave up and started filling liquid nitrogen.

After lunch, I had to fill liquid helium, but the cryogenics technician Chris couldn't come (he usually gives me a hand at the start and the end of the fill), so I figured out a way to do the start of the fill safely and efficiently on my own. Shortly after I started filling, the sound all of a sudden got much quieter -- for a second a thought crossed my mind of an "ice plug" (when air gets frozen inside a tube in the telescope and traps the evaporating liquid helium inside, which is very bad because the pressure can build up and also the solidified air is hard to melt in the presence of liquid helium which is ~50 times colder than even the dry ice!). To my relief, gas was still venting out of the tube. I really hope to not have an ice plug this month! At the end of the fill, I thought I could probably finish it by myself, but then thought it's best to be safe, so got a help from someone in the next room. I felt like this fill was not as efficient as the last one, but it turned out to be the same 72% efficiency. Maybe I can do better next time :)

6-7PM There's a kundalini yoga class on Wednesdays, so I went. The instructor was the soup maker Michelle that I hadn't met yet. We did "breaths of fire" and other quite rigorous exercises that I had never done before, and she was also an excellent instructor. I don't know if they get paid for this, but it's very cool that we have such good instructors who're willing to teach on their free times in addition to their regular work here. While finishing off with nice meditative relaxation on our backs, Michelle pulled each of our bodies to lengthen it; it made me imagine how the spine extends in microgravity to make astronauts temporarily taller... it felt very good. Afterwards at dinner, I told the others at the dinner table how I felt enlightened (not exactly, but it's the nice feeling when your peripheral vision widens and you feel tall) and recommended it.

7:30-9PM After the quick dinner again, I went to the Trauma Team meeting where we got to do some mock exercises of finding an injured patient, assessing thier condition, and putting them on a backboard to transport to the medical room. I hadn't done this since last year, so it was a very helpful refresher for me. I hope in real situation I'm able to act sensibly and efficiently, unlike in this exercise when i felt somewhat unsure of what to do at first.

[12/6(Th) Late night]

I again slept for almost 9 hours, probably because of yoga last night. Today I mostly helped out the other team tidy up their lab, pack their telescope parts for home, and they also helped me lower the tall mast on top of their building.

5:30-6:30PM Went to pilates again, again very good.

9PM-1AM Wrote a long letter.

[12/7(Fr) water restriction]

7AM Woke up and after breakfast, Nacchan called. I was going to head out in 10 minutes, but ended up talking much longer.

Today was finally clear enough to do a star pointing calibration. It was the first time I do this since last year; I did it very carefully and it took 2 hours!

In the afternoon, filled liquid nitrogen and worked with Chris to crane down the 4 liquid nitrogen containers. When he came back with the refilled containers, we craned them up again and he gave me a ride on the snow mobile back to the station just in time for my 4PM bathroom cleaning duty.

7-8:15PM After dinner, played volleyball again on an almost full stomach. Afterwards, I really needed to take a shower, but now there's a severe water restriction because one of the 2 water tanks is being cleaned. I wished that I had the rinse-free "astronaut" shampoo that Nacchan gave me. I also need to do loundry, but that's also prohibited right now.

What is daily life like?

=) Here's what my typical day is like:

5AM	Try to wake up, breakfast
6AM	Walk/ski to the lab (~15 minutes)
7AM	Teleconference w/ team in California (Wed)
8AM	Analysis / Email
9AM	Prepare observing schedule.
10AM	Start recycling the telescope refrigerator. Science meeting (Sat).
11AM	Measure telescope tilt and perform star pointing calibration.
12PM	Walk/ski back to station for lunch.
1PM	Fill liquid nitrogen into telescope.
2PM	Fill liquid helium into telescope.
3PM	Inspect telescope from outside.
4PM	Start observations. Clean bathrooms (Fri).
5PM	Make sure telescope is running according to schedule.
6PM	Walk/ski back for Pilates(Tue,Thu) / Yoga(Wed) / Dinner.
7PM	Volleyball(Tue,Fri)
8PM	Trauma Team meeting (Wed), entertainment (Sat), Science Lecture (Sun)
9PM	Analysis / Try to write a journal.
10PM	Try to sleep.

[12/8(Sa) more skiing!]