Balloon payloads are effectively reusable. You launch your instrument once, after the flight is terminated it lands with the assistance of a parachute, you go out and pick it up, take it back to the lab for repairs/upgrades, and then you’re able to launch it again often within a year or two. So, with such a short flight and a close landing it would be pretty likely that we could recover the entire COSI instrument in the remainder of the Antarctic summer season. Continue reading
Category: Antarctica Life
The last launch attempt was tough. We got so close. Closer than most of us on COSI have ever been to launching a payload that we have worked on. In fact, we got past a point that CSBF said there was no going back from, but then the situation turned a bit dire and we had to back off. Continue reading
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
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
The Crud
The infamous McMurdo Crud. Anyone who has been down here knows about it, probably too well. It’s your common cold &/or stomach bug, but it spreads like no other. It seems like there is no way of avoiding it. Hand sanitizer galore and vigorous hand washing can only go so far. It knocked me out for two days at the beginning of last week, it moved on to McBride, then hit Martin. Who’s next?! Only the Crud knows… 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
It’s been just over 24 hours since we touched down on the Ice, and unfortunately my writing skills are not refined enough for me to explain how amazing it is here. The view are so much more than I was expecting, and I was expecting a lot. The people are fantastic. The food is good. It’s definitely not as cold as we all we thought it would be (although the temperature has been hovering around -15 ºC, it doesn’t feel nearly that bad). And the shuttle trip out to the balloon base (a solid 7.5 miles from McMurdo on the ice shelf) is breathtaking.
View of the Ross Ice Shelf and McMurdo Sound, with Scott Base in the foreground. You can actually see the divide between the sea ice that melts every summer and the permanent ice self.