We’re aiming for a launch around 7AM – 8AM this morning. I’ll try to update here periodically! Continue reading
Author: cliosleator (Page 2 of 2)
Some of us were lucky enough to see a penguin the other day! Alex, Brent, McBride and I were in the van heading back to McMurdo, and saw the penguin between LDB and Willy Field. He was pretty far away, so my pictures aren’t that great. Alan, Martin and Abby were on a later van and were able to get much closer!
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We’re waiting for our next launch opportunity. It’s a little unclear when that will be, as there are currently two balloons ready to launch: us and ANITA. ANITA rolled out today, but the launch attempt got cancelled because the weather wasn’t quite good enough. We’ll see what happens in the next couple of days. Continue reading
Carolyn and I have fallen a bit behind with the blog lately, mostly due to a lot of work and stress leading up to our compatibility test and hang test. These tests are to verify all the communications are functioning and make sure that our instrument is works as expected when put together with everything that CSBF adds. We passed those tests last Friday and Saturday, and are now ready to launch! Continue reading
As of last Friday, we finally have a weather port! This means we’ve been able to really get started working at LDB. The LDB site is about 7.5 miles away from McMurdo, so we have to take a shuttles to get there. Every day (including Sundays), there is a big shuttle bus, called the kress, that takes all the LDB people out there. Continue reading
We’ve been here a few days, and as expected, our weather port is still not done. We currently have a small space to work in the same building as the galley, or cafeteria, at LDB. We don’t have space to unpack the entire shipping container, nor do we want to, as we would then have to move everything into our weather port later. We unpacked what we needed to work on the flight computer, the card cage boards, and some other things. Today we got (very slow) internet in our space, which everyone is pretty excited about.
Brent and our temporary space, which we were in the process of unpacking
We had two full days in Christchurch, NZ. Before being able to explore, we had to get our extreme cold weather gear from the US Antarctic Program office.
Abby, myself, and Carolyn trying out our extreme cold weather gear