Traversing the Space Between

  We’ve had several weeks of bad luck for planes to come into McMurdo. Either weather or mechanical issues have occurred. I finally was able to witness a C-17 arrive on Monday. It was pretty breathtaking to see this large plane just come sailing across the sky, seemingly slow, pass the ice runway known as Phoenix, take a wide bank to reverse directions, and land on the ice. It taxied close to us, and we could see the back doors open and cargo start to be taken out. New Zealand’s Antarctic Program actually had a helicopter onboard, which arrived just in time for their Prime Minister’s visit this week. Several NSF’ers had the privilege of meeting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on her first visit to NZ’s Scott Base. She did tour McMurdo, but alas, I am in COVID jail and did not get to meet her. The C-17 brought many people who had been anxiously waiting in Christchurch for several weeks. It also brought science cargo and freshies, both of which are high priority! Of course, one thing these

What a great couple of days for me! Because of the international date line, I had two October 19 th birthdays. First up was on New Zealand time zone and secondly the next day on the US time zones. I had not expected much having a birthday out here. I arrived only a month ago.  However, in that timeframe, I have met so many wonderful people and have become close to several groups here on station. One of these special teams is the South Pole Traverse (SPOT) team filled with hearty men and a few women that make a yearly trek to the South Pole in tractors to deliver fuel from McMurdo. When I came onboard in November 2021, this team was already out on their journey. I found it fascinating how they would drag fuel bladders by tractor ~25 days to Pole over very challenging terrain, including avoiding crevasses. I will do a whole blog on them, but back to the birthday….   SPOT team does a shorter traverse to a place called the Shear Zone in order to clear the crevasses on the first trek to Pol

Today, my co-worker Marc and I deployed a weather balloon. The weather team deploys these twice a day in McMurdo (at 11:30am and 11:30pm every day year round). There are over 3,000 teams around the world doing the same launches and data takes. This data goes into a big database that people across the world use. Data from the sensor transmits every second. There’s info about air temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. The white item is the sensor. The weather balloons have to be kept warm so they don’t become brittle. They are in a warmer in this picture below. Helium is used to inflate the balloon.  I’m holding the sensor carefully as Marc holds the balloon. We did a countdown and released. The balloon flew up fast! Here’s the sensor readings from it. Unfortunately, neither the sensor nor the balloon is recovered, and they are not biodegradable.

Probably the most important functions for the survival of those at McMurdo are the power generation and water production. I visited both facilities and felt like ECLSS/ATLAS again (my positions at NASA in Mission Control that dealt with similar functions). Power Plant- First, I was shown their displays, which looked very similar to some displays we use on ISS. The supervisor said they get alarms on these screens they are watching. The system sends emails and pages to them as well when a parameter is not nominal. They can also send commands from their displays. There are several power feeds that remind me of MBSUs (main bus switching unit) on ISS. If one goes down, another picks up most of the load.  There’s five ginormous generators with two running at a time. They use JP8 aviation fuel. Moving on to the water plant….. Seawater is pumped to the building through an insulated pipeline approximately 3,000 ft in length. Here’s part of the line and a pump.  It’s processed and goes through r

Last week I had a tour of the McMurdo Ground Station control room and satellite receiver. A little smaller than ISS mission control, but was fun to see their displays, procedure books, and voice loops on their console. The front door reminds me of the sign on the ISS Mission Control door. Oh to only have one procedure book on console! Then we drove up the hill to Arrival Heights and went into the dome that surrounds the satellite receiver. The ground station tracks the NASA Joint Polar System Satellite (JPSS). There’s a great view from the hill, but it was the coldest and windiest place I’ve been. Here’s a view of the receiver later that day from a distance. Later that day we also toured a lab on the top of the hill that Dr. Chu from UC Boulder runs that is doing LiDAR work. Her PhD students were keen to give us a tour. Dr, Chu is really fond of Marc and me. She really enjoyed my ISS lecture. Marc remembers Dr. Chi’s science lecture from 8 years ago, one of the reasons he applied and g