After TIME's Deep Field Shakedown, I spent the week organizing and moving PASSCAL cargo.
This will be a short post with many pictures from my week!
Castle Rock Test Site
Suze and I went out to the test site to retrieve a huddle test of broadband sensors for the GHOST experiment. The very same huddle test that Avi, Alan, and I got stuck installing....
PistenBully 314 was still abandoned out there :( We took some pictures with him to make him feel better. Hopefully the VFM (Vehicle Maintenance Facility) will tow him back into town later this week.
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| Suze relaxing before throwing the survival bags off for us to take back. |
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| A kiss for 314! |
We were gifted stunningly beautiful weather for the day.
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| Mt. Erebus (left, the large volcano) and Castle Rock (middle, the flat-topped rock). |
Cargo
Because PASSCAL supports so many different experiments every season, we have a lot of storage space in McMurdo. Including 4 large Milvans (McMurdo-speak for "shipping containers"). We have several pallets of cardboard boxes for shipping seismic nodes; each node contains a lithium battery, which classifies them as dangerous goods, and they have to be shipped according to certain regulations. So we have several stacks of approved cardboard boxes that we need to store until we ship the nodes back north at the end of the season.
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| The milvans were so iced in that we couldn't open the doors. Here I am chipping away with an ice chipper to get them to open. |
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| A pallet of cardboard boxes for the nodes sitting outside. You might note the "Keep Dry" sticker contrasted with the moisture inside the plastic wrap. |
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| Spot the Madeline hiding amongst the cardboard boxes. |
Each full pallet of cardboard boxes weighed in at 300lbs. Suze and I managed to wrestle all but one into the milvan. But our heavy lifting was far from over....
We also retrieved 36 lead-acid batteries from the milvan that will be used at one of the sites going on Mt. Erebus this season. The batteries will need to be charged in our office and then packed up and given to the helicopter operations folks.
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| Alan made these nifty battery spacers to keep the terminals from being crushed. |
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| Each battery weighs 75lbs, and I moved 18 of them... so I moved 1350lbs by hand in an hour. |
We also got out a large orange sensor dome. This will be used for one of the Erebus Perimeter sites, probably at Cape Royds. The dome sits over a seismic sensor to insulate it and decrease wind noise in the data. The domes are also incredibly inconvenient to carry, and, you guessed it, quite heavy.
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| Yay, seismology! |
Housing Update
I love my room! My roommate is wonderful and has the room set up for maximum coziness and privacy with curtains hanging around our beds. I brought some battery-powered Christmas lights for the field, but went ahead and set them up in my room, too.
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| So cozy! Ft. Sheepy the Sheep and Budino the Penguin. |
Comments
Love, Mom