Dispatches from the Bottom of the World: A Little More Science

MAPO under the moon

The last couple of weeks I’ve been making the kilometer long hike out to MAPO pretty regularly to check on some of the other science I’m taking care of this winter. MAPO, or the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory, is another one of the buildings in the dark sector, and houses the machine shop, a couple of CMB experiments and AMANDA (Antactic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array). AMANDA is pretty cool in that it uses the entire Earth as a detector. Basically, high energy neutrinos passing through the Earth sometimes interact with the Earth in just the right way to create a bit of light. AMANDA has an array of phototubes sunk deep into the ice to look for this light.

Anyways, the two projects I’m looking after over in MAPO are RICE4/AURA and the Gattini-UV South Pole Camera. AURA (Askaryan Under-ice Radio Array) is a new experiment which is utilizing the work begin done for one of the other telescopes down here (IceCube). The goal is to create a large scale (100 – 1000 cubic km) radio array to detect neutrinos. Where I come in is running RICE4, which was a precursor to AURA, that is now being used to calibrate and check the new array.

The electronics for RICE and AURA. Kind of a mess.

Basically, I check to see that things are running properly (ie. data is being taken), start a new data run when the old one is done, and send the data along to folks back in the States to look at. Lately I’ve been working with one of the scientists back home to set up a pulser, in order to calibrate the equipment, since we were getting some very noisy, unhelpful data a few weeks ago.

The other project, Gattini-UV South Pole Camera, is being used to study the UV properties of the night sky above the South Pole in an effort to evaluate the site for possible future optical and UV telescopes. So far, all I’ve had to do is check on it once a week to make sure that we don’t have drifts building up over the window of the camera.

Gattini-UV with SPT in the distance

And looking the other direction, the MAPO dish

Other than work, life has been pretty quite of late. Doc has taken to having the trauma team do weekly drills for our training, rather than lectures/powerpoints, which has been fun, and probably better for us than more talking, now that we’ve covered the basics. Last week we found Shawn in the heavy shop like this:

Katie and I, trying to figure out how to get Shawn out.

He is in between one of the big snow plows and its blade, with a big gash on his forehead and a piece of rebar “through” his leg. Katie and I also found bruising on his chest and ankle. We were pretty slow about getting him out of there and back to medical (it took about 45 minutes, meaning he would probably be dead in real life). But we did eventually get him out and up to the clinic.