Me in the middle of nowhere...
I went on a sight-seeing tour of couple of places on Monday. Ice cube was the first place I went. It is not far from the main station but we got to ride on a snow mobile - their project is to drill holes in the ice with a firn drill and plant these round balls in the ice... these round things are called doms each worth $5,000 each. The goal this year is to plant 14 of them in the ice about a square by 2 miles deep. The point of this is that the doms look for subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are so tiny, they pass through everything and occasionally collide with a water molecule nucleus and emit a light that the dom senses. With this sensor, scientists can triangulate its trajectory, and find out where in outerspace it came from. Neutrinos are otherwise invisible, and would give these scientists clues to the existence of undetected supernovas, black holes, or other stuff in the universe. Also, because the neutrinos are almost completely massless, they head in a straight line, unhindered by gravity from earth, other planets or galaxies, and give a pretty accurate trajectory. The plan is to see where these neutrinos are coming from and when there are many neutrinos found in a certain area, the scientists can maneuver a telescope into space toward the direction the neutrinos came from.
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The mid-rat crew with
firn drill.
Dom
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There is another project involving the largest telescope in the world. It's taken quite a while to build this - and is still being built. A part of this telescope was on the plane on my return to Pole. Just the nuts and bolts alone weigh 6500 tons. It's a big telescope called the 10 meter. It's main purpose is to discover the beginning of earth - and go back all the way to the big bang.
My other trip was called snow stakes. A little less technical but still interesting. I went out with one of the meteorologists to measure these stakes in the snow - they get checked on annually to see how strong the wind is and to measure the snow drift from the previous year as with the angle of the stake. There were 40 stakes in all that took us roughly 12 miles from the station and about 6 hours to check all of them. It was really great - being that far away, there was nothing in sight except snow and sky. Course, on the way back we played a round of Antarctic golf.
Nothing but snow and sun... Lance and I checking a snow stake.
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The hole where the dom will go.
There is another project involving the largest telescope in the world. It's taken quite a while to build this - and is still being built. A part of this telescope was on the plane on my return to Pole. Just the nuts and bolts alone weigh 6500 tons. It's a big telescope called the 10 meter. It's main purpose is to discover the beginning of earth - and go back all the way to the big bang.
My other trip was called snow stakes. A little less technical but still interesting. I went out with one of the meteorologists to measure these stakes in the snow - they get checked on annually to see how strong the wind is and to measure the snow drift from the previous year as with the angle of the stake. There were 40 stakes in all that took us roughly 12 miles from the station and about 6 hours to check all of them. It was really great - being that far away, there was nothing in sight except snow and sky. Course, on the way back we played a round of Antarctic golf.
Nothing but snow and sun... Lance and I checking a snow stake.
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7 miles from the main station
Me in front of our mode of transportation - a piston bully.
My first attempt at golf.
All of us - Jason, me, Lynette, Lance and Emrys finishing up on golf.
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12 miles from station - out of sight except for our vehicle tracks on where we came from.
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