Expeditions to Pole for this 100th anniversary season

For the 100th anniversary of the Amundsen and Scott expedition race to the South Pole.

Also found this specific to Norwegian commemorations of the 100th anniversary.


Here's some notes from an NSF person pulling together items for the anniversary.

There's a British Army effort in honor of Scott's failed expedition.

And a Norwegian Expedition currently enroute towards the Pole.

Our new IceCube winterovers (11's)

My old colleague Scott Nutter

He's in McMurdo (which isn't quite the bottom of the world, but you can fly nonstop to there) working on the CREST experiment and has a rather nice blog of life in McMurdo. Do check it out!

Preparations around the IceCube Lab (ICL)

ARA drill systems showing up around the ICL.


Loading ramp up to the ICL. Nice and clear day...

Photos are from just a couple of days ago. (Outhouse and waste line coming soon.)

Last bits on the HAWC review

Am back from the site and from the Puebla Review of the HAWC experiment. There is some online information showing the schedule and documentation details of the review here at this location. The Photo Gallery is especially good.

Science and technical reviews

So, this is probably going to be a dull entry, but I wanted to detail what sort of event I'm attending this week down in Puebla. This is a review called by the funding agencies to assess the progress of the experiment and verify that the money is being spent well.

To do that, there are management folks from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (the main US funders of the project), some science reviewers from similar (or not especially similar) projects acting as peer reviewers, and folks from the Mexican funding agencies (which have a complicated setup that I don't fully understand) here to listen to talks from all different pieces of the experiment and ask questions.

Physicists are generally, let's go ahead and stereotype a little bit, pretty critical, and willing to push on questions for which they are unable with the answers. So a Q&A with a panel of physicists can be a loud, even brutal business. Obviously the management folks are much more reserved in such questioning. So talks have to be vetted ahead of time and delivered with some care.

So far the review has been going well, the project is in relatively good shape. Some things, especially for the site construction work, have been moving slowly, but delays are of a few months, nothing too horrible. The project now has about 135 people in the US and Mexico, and the total budget for the project will be on the order of $15M.

Last year and this coming year IceCube Winterovers

HAWC Observatory

You can get more information from the new website.

A few nature photos from my last visit to the HAWC site

Minor detour from the South Pole

This week I'm headed to Puebla, Mexico for the joint NSF-DoE (National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, the two main US funding sources for science that isn't related to your congressman's liver (that would be the National Institutes of Health, funding whatever the congressfolks are scared of medically)) review of the HAWC experiment. This is a science and management review to make sure that we're spending the taxpayer money well, and that the project is progressing reasonably.

HAWC is the High Altitude Water Cherenkov experiment. That means it's being built at high altitude, 4100 meters or about 14000 feet above sea level, in order to get higher up into the cascade (or shower) of energetic particles produced when cosmic rays or gamma rays hit the top of the atmosphere. The detector technology is Water Cherenkov, that is, we observe the light emitted from fast-moving particles traversing through a water tank. The light is detected with photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) capable of seeing single photons with nanosecond (billionth of a second) resolution. It's the gamma rays at energies at the top of the atmosphere of near 1 TeV (10^12 electron volts) that are of particular interest.

One of the main goals of HAWC is to observe the whole sky (rather than like an optical telescope, just the small patch of the sky one is aimed at) in these TeV gamma rays (which are super-high energy photons) for transient sources. The main goal is to observe gamma ray bursts (GRBs, very energetic astronomical explosions much of the way across the universe) at higher energies than previously seen. This would enable us to better understand the physics of the GRB sources and the propagation (travel) of the photons from those sources to the Earth.

To one specific high altitude valley in Mexico to be precise. It's a beautiful site, so look for photos in the next couple of days...

First LC-130s at Pole

Thanks to Freija for the photos (from the weekly Winter-Over report). The LC-130s are ski-equiped US military transport planes operated by the New York Air National Guard (NYANG, with various pronunciations of the acronym).

First arrivals at South Pole

The two IceCube Winter-Overs are enroute from McMurdo down to the South Pole today. They'll gradually take over, during the next two or so weeks, from the previous Winter-Overs. The two of them will run the IceCube instrumentation at Pole during the next twelve months with oversight from the Northern Hemisphere. But when a fan is blocked, and the over-temperature alarm sounds for a computer (odd thinking about overheating at the South Pole!) and a beeper goes off, it's one of the Winter-Overs who slogs the mile from the South Pole Station over to the IceCube Laboratory regardless of the time of day or the weather.

Some of our other colleagues are also heading that direction, and some of my ballooning colleagues are in McMurdo already getting ready to prepare the CREST instrument for flight. (CREST is a novel attack on the problem of understanding the TeV electrons in the cosmic radiation, see the talk here for (technical) details.)

The first flights in and out of Pole are on Baslers (see photo above, modified DC-3s, airframes over 50 years old!). More on those planes some other time...

Quantum diaries

I'm joining up with the Quantum Diaries particle physics blog in the next week or so. Will see how to balance my blogging from the southlands...

Cards from Pole

If you want a postcard or envelope from the South Pole (definitely with some South Pole postmark, and possibly with a cool South Pole postmark), let me know...

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.

C-17 Winter airdrop at South Pole

This was medical supplies for the Winter Station Manager who had a stroke back in August.

South Pole packing list

Well, for McMurdo Base on the coast, all you need are sneakers and regular clothes. Warm boots if you get cold feet easily, and the staff at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center, not Centers for Disease Control) in Christchurch, New Zealand will get you outfitted with the rest. It's warmer there in McMurdo than back in the upper Midwest of the US in November through February.

But for Pole, it's genuinely cold there, and a lot of the work is outside. So you need to bring some good sock liners (polypropylene, or SmartWool, or silk, try REI or the like) to wear under big wool socks (these are issued, but you're better off with your own good wool socks, I like these Swedish army wool surplus socks I got a few years ago, big, thick, and comfortable). You also need slippers or flip flops for around the station and to the sauna and the like. Good thermal underwear is nice as what is issued doesn't fit me very well. Polypropylene or silk work well again for this inner layer. SmartWool if you can afford it. Outer layers are pretty good as issued, but a pair of your own warm boots is useful. Sorrels work fine. I have a pair of Columbia -40F (-40F and -40C are the same, which is nice and convenient) boots that are plenty warm enough most of the time.

One of my colleagues made an impression by wearing a tuxedo for the New Year's party. Suit and tie or nice dress are not out of place for Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners. And you'll want a hat that people can recognize from a distance outside.

Resuming for the 2011-2012 South Pole campaign

I'm headed back to Antarctica for the ARA (Askaryan Radio Array) project in November. I'll be down at the Pole for the 100th anniversary of Amundsen's arrival at the Pole. So my blog should have lots of history as well as the "what I'm up to at the bottom of the world" sort of things. Stay tuned!

That's probably about it for the Antarctic blog for this year

I haven't posted anything for a bit, and I've shown most of my pictures here, so I think I'll close this up for the season. It seems likely that I'll be back down to the South Pole next austral summer for the next phase of the ARA construction, so I'll resume Antarctica postings then.

Cheers,
Mike