Lock and load!

I have now left the South Pole, although the last 72 hours were a blur of occasional cat-naps as I struggled to get the rest of my work done.  This final push is a common experience there, and was certainly my experience the last time I went as well.  The moment I sat down on our "herc" to fly out, I was out cold until we arrived in McMurdo Sound.

As a result of my efforts and that of my colleagues, we now have 3 cameras on the sky, seeing "first light" over this past weekend.  Two are now on Keck Array, set to map the sky at the "blue" 220GHz, and the much larger BICEP-3, set to map the sky at the "red" 95GHz.

Above is a time-lapse video of us loading BICEP-3 into the mount, spanning about 1 hour of work.  You don't see me much because I'm the one in the back turing the wench and actually lifting the camera (1200 lbs) up into place.  I like this slightly blurred photo that someone took of me:

You also don't see the 3-4 people up in the mount watching to make sure the camera does not crush any cables or lines during lifting.  Here's an artistically modified photo of some of them working on that, made to look like a comic book drawing:

Finally, a photo of the gang experiencing "first light" of BICEP-3 on Tuesday:

I missed out on that, although I did get to watch one of the Keck-220s turn on.  This happened the same evening that our friends on the Event Horizon Telescope turned on and made a quick low-resolution map of the center of our galaxy.  As is the custom, we all drank a celebratory wee dram.  And as I described earlier, we enjoy a healthy camaraderie with our DSL colleagues (in this context, Event Horizon is an extension of the South Pole Telescope)

As of now, all three cameras "work" inasmuch that they can look at the sky without the sky appearing too bright and saturating the sensors.  The team is currently in the process of characterizing how they work, and the results of these measurements will be used when analyzing the maps made by the camera as well as for understanding any flaws so we can fabricate better detectors in the future.  Now it's time for science

The Traverse

I was recently asked “How does the station here generate electricity?”  The answer, unsurprisingly, is that we burn fuel to run generators, heat the buildings, melt ice into water, etc.  Historically, the fuel was delivered by aircraft-- LC-130 skier planes fly from McMurdo to Pole with far more fuel than they need and unload some when on the ground.

However, airlifting fuel is not that efficient: each flight can only deliver 1/3 of its fuel at best.  Starting 12 years ago, the Antarctic Programs began building a Highway from McMurdo to the South Pole so they could use large tractors to drag bags (“bladders”) of fuel across the ice (seen arriving at the South Pole Station in the picture below).  There are currently three traverses per season, and each delivers 100,000 gallons of fuel to the station, which nearly satisfies the station needs.  They get the last 100,000 gallons from a dozen planes.

The route that the traverse takes is a bit different that the route taken by the early explorers.  Amundsen, Scott, and Shakleton all chose routes that were nearly direct shots from the Ross Sea, scaling glaciers in the Trans-antarctic Mountains.  The modern traverse path circumvents much of the mountains and ascends a 15% grade on the side of the continent nearest South America. 

This route also minimizes the number of crevaces.  Crevaces at the edges of glaciers can be perilous, and the traverse uses ground radar to watch for them.  When found, they dynamite them to clear out snow bridges and then use their trucks to shovel in snow fill.  This is a constant maintenance task.

In addition to the fuel bladders, they drag a few RV-style living quarters.  These contain a small kitchenette, a bathroom and shower, and sets of bunk-beds.  Their living quarters are far less rugged than I envisioned.

SPIDER launched

After nearly a decade of preparation, SPIDER launched today.  You can see a video of the launch here:

I described what they were up to in this blog-post a few weeks back.  While I don't directly work on this project, I and many others loosely connected to the project really want to see it succeed.  This is the proving grounds for a future satellite mission using the technology that I have worked really hard on for years now.  Regardless of the science that comes out of this mission, if all goes according to plan, they will have demonstrated a huge technological leap forward.

My colleagues down in McMurdo are now frantically communicating with the balloon by radio to try to get all the electronics tuned up.  Many of the detection systems cannot be tuned until they are at high altitude, and while that team has worked very hard at automating this, they still need some human intervention.  But there’s a limited time because once the balloon passes over the horizon (about 48 hours), it must function nearly autonomously.  Once out of sight, their bandwidth for communication isn’t much better than sending a “tweet” every few minutes.  (as of Jan 5, all systems are "go".)

They will be mapping this region of sky, shown at left and outlined in white a figure from a recent paper:

The colors in the background show a model of dust from our galaxy and you can see what we've focused on with the BICEP and Keck telescopes in the grey box in the lower right.  So their map will be much larger, albeit not as deep (i.e. more noise in each part of the map than we have).  But that should let them look at larger modes on the sky, which will be exciting.

Happy New Years from the South Pole

Our time-zone is completely arbitrary down here, but since operations for McMurdo and South Pole are coordinated through Christchurch, we’re on New Zealand time.  This puts us just on the other side of the date-line and makes us one of the first to celebrate the New Years.

We managed to get all three of our new cameras cooling down by the New Years so we could enjoy the holiday and maybe work at a slightly lighter pace over the next week.  This includes two small cameras that will go into Keck Array and let us map at a color (220GHz) where galactic dust is bright and then one large camera that will provide lots of sensitivity at a color (90GHz) where we can ignore dust.  We will begin characterizing them in a week or so once cold enough to operate and then hopefully load them into their mounts a week yet later.

To celebrate, we did some sledding.  Despite the terrible bandwidth here, I managed to get a video to load overnight:

I’m guessing this one got through because everyone else on base was recovering from New Years.