Work images from the last few days

Christian doing some antenna testing in the IceCube Lab. That's a bird-cage looking biconical antenna for our downhole vertical polarization measurements.

WiFi propagation testing out in the middle of what will be the ARA37 array. Beautiful solar effects here many days.

Drill camp coming down. Everything needs to be stored for next year, shipped back to the States, or disposed of. We made quite a mess in just a few weeks...

Testing of the downhole receiver strings...

...all of whose parts are sitting out on the IceCube Lab porch to cool off.

General ARA talk

So I gave a talk on ARA for the folks here at the IceCube Research Center (soon to be the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center) at lunchtime. This was a talk intended for a mix of physics folks and the financial folks and the secretaries and all. Not sure if it was completely success for a general audience, but feel free to take a look at the talk. Comments always welcomed.

My experiment at South Pole this year

Will be mostly working on ARA, the Askaryan Radio Array, which has only the saddest, slimmest web page at the moment. The writeup at Wikipedia is actually better, though hardly comprehensive.

If you can handle the science lingo, then your best bet is our paper on the Arxiv e-print server. That covers last year's TestBed installation and also the proposed, and perhaps soon-to-be-funded, full 37 station version of the experiment.

There are also some unannotated photos from last year's Pole season. Plus look back at my postings from last season.

Shallow ARA antennas

We have a small number of shallow antennas for the ARA TestBed, these were installed in bored holes in the snow. Hot water drilling for deeper holes should commence later today.

Materials for students to learn about Antarctic science

The US Antarctic Program homepages:
http://www.usap.gov/

The University of Delaware (Bartol Research) site talking about IceTop/IceCube construction:
http://www.expeditions.udel.edu/antarctica/building-icecube-icetop.html

Dispatches from Polar Scientists (Exploratorium):
http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/index.php

Teachers & researchers on the ice:
http://www.polartrec.com/

Some IceCube videos (three of them, available in different formats):
http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/~malkus/Video/MMSDVideo/

IceCube Project Homepage:
http://icecube.wisc.edu/

ARA Project Homepage, but there's not much here yet:
http://ara.physics.wisc.edu/