Happy Halloween :)

31 October 2010

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from the South Pole!  Today marks my one week anniversary at 90 South, and we are still blissfully happy!  Okay… lame, I know.  Truthfully, everything is still great down here.  After a week of turnover with Johan and Nick, I’m feeling pretty good about them leaving on Wednesday.  There are still things I’m shaky on, but at some point you just have to start doing things by yourself.

Since many winterovers were sure they were leaving Saturday, there was no Halloween party planned.  We were supposed to have two Hercs arrive on station, but two unfortunate events occurred that day: a French helicopter crashed somewhere on the Ice, causing one of our Hercs to be deployed for the recovery mission, and the second Herc suffered an engine casualty soon after takeoff from McMurdo and had to return to the airfield immediately.  Both events left the winter-overs stranded at Pole for Halloween.  At the last minute,  a few of the science techs banded together and created their own party.

The party was a lot of fun!  The party supplies down here are pretty awesome.  We had serious lights (strobe, disco, different colors) run by a real light board, and a serious sound system!  About half the attendees arrived in costume.  We had: 2 pirates, a shark, Indiana Jones, Lucifer, and a man with a beautiful blonde wig.  It was quite funny.  Aside from the winter-overs and a few new summer guys (myself included), the flight crew from a Canadian twin otter that spent the night joined in the fun.  Good times!

Today was busy, busy, busy!  On top of the instruments I am brushing up on, we had to do a little fixin’.  When I left Boulder, I was given a few replacement parts for the Nephelometer, an instrument which measures aerosols and their scattering properties.  I brought with me several photomultiplier tubes and filters for the unit.  One of the components of the instrument was getting incorrect readings – hopefully one of these parts would be the fix.  We first installed the new filter.  This involved shutting down the acquisition system, shutting off the nephelometer, completely unplugging it, disconnecting all of the air intake and exhaust tubes, and taking it down off a high shelf.  Then we took off one of the covers, swapped out the filter and re-assembled the instrument.  Once it was up and running again, we were able to look at the data and see that the problem wasn’t fixed.  Next we replaced the photomultiplier tube through the same process with the same result.  Darn!  We’ve all the trouble-shooting we could do down here for the moment.  Now we just have to wait to hear back from Boulder this week with more ideas…

So we think tomorrow is the BIG DAY.  Aka the first Hercs will probably arrive!  There are four flights on the schedule – two with passengers arriving, one taking passengers away, and two presumably with fuel and cargo.  Very exciting!  All of us that arrived by Basler (about 50 of us) are anxiously awaiting our luggage (as I’m sure you gathered from my last few posts).  I’m also excited to see the friends I made in fire school!  Keep your fingers crossed that the weather will cooperate in McMurdo and that the planes actually run!