The Milky Way from DA

Not much to report this week. It has been cold and dark, enough that our scheduled station safety drill got pushed offuntil next week. The pressure has been super low for the past week and a half, so the physio elevation has been right around 11,000 ft, with the highest being about 11,300 feet. The side-effects of that kind of elevation were some head aches (at least for me, although they’ve gone away for the most part), and some grumpy people suffering from lack of sleep. The high elevation also made working out harder, especially intervals.

The cooks just switched shifts last week, so we’ve gotten some different styles of cooking for breakfast and dinner. We also got this:

The cake is a reference to this video: Honey Badger

One of the scientists on station has been doing Monday night astronomy classes, and this last week he took us outside to take a look at the sky.

Robert showing off his fancy green laser

Iridium flare

He used a green laser to point out various constellations, and Carlos got some pretty cool pictures.

Tuesday, the trauma team had another little drill. This time we were trying to get our patient out from underneath the floor of the station.

Our friend, the dummy, got into trouble again

Kind of a tight spot, but we got him out on a backboard without hitting his head too many times, and we were fast about it that with Shawn last week.

This weekend was our two-day weekend for the month of May, and we kicked it off with appetizers down in the green house on Friday night.

Joceline crushing lemon balm and mint from the green house,
to add to the home-made hibiscus spritzer

And even thought the cooks had the weekend off, we still got two hot dinners. On Saturday, Shawn, Jared, and I did a burger bar and showed “Two Lane Blacktop” in the galley. Jono made shakes/malts, which were great, and added to the ‘50’s feel of the evening. It went well enough that we are planning another burger night, with a summer theme, for August or September. Tonight Dale, the weather guy, made a Greek dinner, which was delicious, especially the baklava. 

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.

Shawn, with IVs and the EKG hooked up

After we got done with him, Shawn spend the rest of the day walking around like this:

Shawn of the dead

The Dark Sector Lab

As you already know, part of my duties down here involve delivering helium to BICEP2, one of the telescopes in the dark sector. The main rules for entry into the dark sector are no white lights (only red), and no keying your radio, unless it is an emergency. Both those rules are to reduce interference with the science that goes on out there. There are four telescopes in the dark sector, MAPO, ICE CUBE, BICEP2 and SPT (South Pole Telescope). Both BICEP2 and SPT are located furthest from the station, in the Dark Sector Lab (DSL), so that is what I know most about.

DLS: SPT is blocking the sun, and BICEP2 is to the far right

SPT is a 10m telescope (the largest every deployed at the South Pole), designed to do large-scale millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys of faint, low contrast emissions, making it idea to observe primary and secondary anisotopies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). As an aside, anisotropy is the property being directionally dependent, as apposed to isotropy, which suggests identical properties in all directions. One example of anisotropy is light coming through a polarizer. In one orientation, a certain component of light will be transmitted, while another component will be absorbed and/or reflected. An example of an anisotropic material is wood, which is easier to split along the grain than against it.

In this case, no light will be transmitted through the second
polarizer, much like if you orient the lenses of two pair of
polarized sunglasses perpendicular to each other, no light
will get through.

In the case of the CMB, anisotropy is used to describe its uneven temperature distribution. By carefully mapping the CMB, the scientists working with SPT are able to find clusters of galaxies and determine their sizes. The hope is to use this to confirm the existence of Dark Energy, one of the main components of the universe (matter makes up only about 4% of the universe). DE pushes things that are far apart, even further apart, the opposite of gravity, which pulls things togeather. If it exists, it will have an effect on how galaxy clusters, the biggest things in the universe, grow over time. By tracking how many large-massed clusters have developed during different periods in the history of the universe, they can probe the opposing forces of gravity and DE.

The CMB. The different colors represent different temperatures.
The coldest areas are dark blue, while the warmest are red. The circle
highlights a particularly large and cold region that was studied at the
UofM

BICEP2 is also a millimeter/sub-millimeter telescope studying the CMB. It this case, however, BICEP2 is looking at the CMB in order to explore the conditions in the universe in the earliest times after the Big Bag. The CMB is the result of photons produced when the universe cooled enough to allow electrons to combine to form hydrogen (~380,000 years after the Big Bang), making the CMB the oldest light in the universe, and thus, a very powerful tool for probing the universe at these early times. One of the theories of what happened immediately after the Big Bang, is that the universe underwent a period of rapid expansion called Inflation. If this did in fact occur, it would produce something called the Cosmic Gravitational-Wave Background, which in turn would have left a faint signature in the polarization of the CMB. It is this signature that BICEP2 (512 detectors), and its predecessor BICEP1(98 detectors), are searching for.

The optics and detector of BICEP.  The 4-tile focal plane unit is where
the detectors are located. The 512 detectors of BICEP2 are divided
amongthree of these BICEP2/Keck inserts.

My role in all this is delivering the helium that keeps the optics and detectors on BICEP2 cool. The optics are kept at a temperature of 4K, four degrees above absolute zero. The detectors are kept evern cooler, at 250mK. This reduces the amount of electron noise in the detectors, allowing them to more sensitively and accurately detect that signature they are looking for.

In the case of both BICEP2 and SPT, they were built at the South Pole for a very specific reason. It is extremely dry here. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs millimeter and sub-millimeter wave lengths, making it difficult to observe the CMB in most places. The combination of altitude (almost 11,000 ft) and cold temperatures make for a very dry atmosphere. As an added bonus, night lasts for months here. The lack of daily sunrises/sunsets make for an extremely stable atmosphere, and allow for extended observations that would otherwise be interrupted by the sun.

A couple more pretty pictures of DSL

If you'd like to learn more about BICEP2 and SPT, these are some good places to start:

BICEP2

South Pole Telescope

Sorry about not posting last week. Things got away from me a bit.

Anyways, it is now full dark, and we’ve been getting auroras pretty regularly.

Aurora over the station. The bright spot is Guy driving the groomer.

Aurora over the cryo building. Photo taken by Carlos Pobes, with
a nicer camera than mine.

It is really amazing to walk outside and see them, along with the night sky in general. There are so many stars out. So far the auroras haven’t been super bright, but I’ve heard from others that they get brighter and more colorful later in the season. There are times that they get bright enough to read by. I can’t wait!

On the cryo front, Guy built a snow ramp up to the main bay door of the building. Now Steffen and I can drive the sled right up to the door, unload the dewar and park the snow mobile inside, rather than leaving it out in the cold or driving it back to the garage while we fill.

Buzz hanging out in Cryo

We also had to switch snow mobiles. Mad Max had a bad seal, so whenever we took it outside, it would start leaking oil. Now we’re using Buzz Bomb, and it seem to be working better. Another change is that I am moving to nights for the next couple of months. Since BICEP follows a sidereal schedule, the LHe fills have to follow the same schedule. So, for the next month and half deliveries will be in the evening, and then move to the middle of the night, then early morning, at which point I’ll probably switch back to days. My plan is to get up early enough in the afternoon that I don’t miss too much of the social stuff, otherwise, the only person I’ll ever talk to is Steffen, and I don’t think I’m okay with that. Tonight is my first night shift. Wish me luck.

For rec., we finally got soccer organized. It was way fun. I’d gotten used to running on the treadmill and biking and doing short stuff in volleyball and kickball, but running up and down the court continuously left all of us sucking wind. I think Jared described it as feeling like he was drowning. I don’t think it was quiet that bad, but it definitely felt like doing had intervals. Still fun.  Also, the South Pole Pool League is starting up soon. The league ends in a tournament. There are four of us, Jared, Shawn, Heather, and myself, who will be completing for last place. We’re all pretty bad, but I think that since we started practicing at the beginning of the week, I’ve gotten worse.

This morning Marcus made strawberry frappucinnos and Travis modeled the Loch Ness pool floatie that was hanging out in the galley for some reason.

Travis, pool-ready

Blog note: If you click on the Picture of the Day to the left, it should link to my photobucket account, where you can take a look at all my photos. Please let me know it it works or not. Thanks!

Porky Pig

Note: This post has picture of a dead pig, so if that is not you’re thing, you might want to skip this one.

It is definitely getting dark. We saw our first aurora this week. They weren’t hugely impressive, still fairly dim and not much color. They should get better as full dark sets in, and hopefully by then I will have figured out the right settings on my camera. Other than that, it has been another cold week, but it warmed up to about –75F in time for my most recent delivery, and then up to –50F today, which makes it down right balmy right now. This was the first delivery where we really needed to use lights and headlamps, which made for exciting driving.

Trauma team training was a lot of fun this week. Doctor Dale and Heather, our PA, special ordered us a pig out of the berms.

 

Heather and Gus unwrapping our pig

 We used the pig to practice inserting inter-osteous lines. IO’s are like IVs, but instead of inserting the line into a vein, it gets inserted into bone. Usually it is used when there is trouble accessing a vein, so here, where the emergencies we run into are probably going to involve the cold, learning how to do this makes sense.

Finding the bone

Inserting the needle

At the same time, we learned how to spike IV bags.

Jace showing off a successfully spiked IV bag

While part of the trauma team was doing that,  the rest of us practiced doing intubations on a dummy. 

Nasopharyngeal airway

Nasotracheal Intubation

And then, this is a photo of the station that came out with an interesting effect.

Delivery

This last weekend was pretty exciting. We got down to –100F on Saturday afternoon. That is the earliest in the season that the temperature has ever hit that mark, and it looks like we’ll be getting back down there again towards the end of the week. It was actually pretty perfect timing on the part of the weather, since we had a station-wide safety stand-down, which meant we got the afternoon to take a break and think about how to maintain a safe environment. About 15 of us took that to mean we should join the 300 Club. The club has been a tradition since the station has existed with a sauna. The requirements for joining are to take a 200F sauna and then run out to the pole. So we got the sauna heated up (to about 230F actually), then cooked in there for about 20 minutes. Once we were nice and toasty, we stripped down and ran outside in nothing but our boots, and got pictures. The nice thing about taking the sauna is that the cold didn’t really get to you until you were already on your way back in. The second time out, most of just walked, instead of sprinting. 

In the sauna, and on the screen

Other than that, Easter morning came with little baskets of candy in front of each of our doors. Thank you Easter Bunny!

After that I had a helium delivery to make. BICEP2, the telescope, needs a delivery of about 250L of LHe every 6-7 days. We usually plan for every 6 days, so that if the weather is bad (stormy, or cold, like it was Saturday) we can push it off for a day. The BICEP guy, Steffen, heads out to the telescope to get the dewar prepped for pick up, then gives me a call, and I go get Mad Max and the sled. 

Mad Max, the science machine

 Then it is out to the telescope to pick up the dewar, and back to cryo. Once the dewar is inside, Steffen takes Max back to the heavy shop, since it is way too cold to leave it idling outside. Meanwhile, I get things prepped inside, and take some initial measurements, like the weights for Fatman and whichever of the Chipmunks we’re filling from this time.

Weighing Fatman

    Once Steffen gets back, we get the transfer lines hooked up to one of the big dewars and then run it over to Fatman. 

Transfer line to Fatman. If you look close, you can see a small plume of
helium coming out of the end of the stinger.

    After that, it is mainly a matter of waiting and watching, adjusting some of the valves to throttle the flow to the Bouncy Castle and to the compressor. 

The Bouncy Castle, full of helium. It takes about 5 hours
for the compressor to pump it out and into the half-racks in
the background.

    Once Fatman is full, Steffen gets Max again, while I take final measurements and get things ready for the trip back to BICEP.

Riding back to the telescope (straight ahead).

Bringing the dewar alongside BICEP

Bringing the dewar up to the third floor via crane

The past week also saw our first moonrise in the dark. The sun is mostly set at this point; so watching the moon come up was pretty spectacular. By the time it sets again, in about two weeks, it should be full dark. 

Moon rise near the telesopes. The outline of SPT/BICEP2 is
just visible to the left of the moon.

  

Odd Jobs

As you might have gathered, we are a pretty small community down here at the South Pole. So, in addition to the job we each got hired to do, everybody is expected to help out with other jobs around the station. For example, everybody rotates through the dish pit about once a month. On house-mouse Mondays we get together with our team and tackle the cleaning for some portion of the station, whether it is cleaning the bathrooms, moping a hall, or organizing the arts & crafts room.  My team, Lynette, John O, and myself, is pretty awesome. We do a good job. Six of us have volunteered to be peer-counselors for the season, so we’ll be starting training for that soon.

Probably the most important of our extra jobs is the emergency response team. There are four teams on station and everyone is on one of them. The teams are the fire brigade, the hasty team (first ones on site to evaluate), the transport team, and the trauma team (my team). In order to be ready to go if there is an emergency situation, we’ve got training once a week, plus an emergency response drill every month.

Last week we had our March drill, and the first drill of the season. It was fun, if a bit stressful. The trauma and transport teams were actually already together, getting training on using backboards and stretchers. When the alarm went off, most of us started running for our ECW gear and then headed to the muster point. For trauma, that is Medical. Then we waited around to hear what our emergency was. In this case, there was a fire out in summer camp, at the cargo head quarters, one casualty. So four of us grabbed first-aid bags, a backboard and oxygen and head out to the waiting LMC to get a ride out.

Our ride. Sorry, some of these pictures are a little blurry.

On the ride over, we figured out that I was, somehow, the person with the most medical training (other than our PA, who was there as an observer), so I ended up taking over for the first responders in evaluating the patient. Our patient, a 90lb dummy with a welding mask for a face, was found unconscious in a building where the electric heater has caught fire. His breathing and pulse were normal, but he was unresponsive. We administered oxygen and got him onto a backboard, only to realize that the Dr. Down (a sleeping bag type thing that is easy to put on over a backboard) hadn’t made it out to the site. The nearest cache was over at cryo, and I was the only person who knew were that was, since it was the one cache we hadn’t visited on our medical tour the previous week. So, I left Katie in charge of the patient and went sprinting off. When I got back, between the hill climb on the way back, the cold air and running in big boots, I was pretty winded. Anyways, we got our guy into the bag and loaded onto a sled behind a snowmobile. After that, those of us who hadn’t stayed with the patient weren’t entirely sure what to do, since the LMC was gone. So, we started walking back, with the LMC picking us up part way. Back on station, we rushed over to meet the wheely stretcher and bring it to Medical.

Rolling down to medical.

Once there we got him onto the table. Doc had Gus run an IV and Travis start bagging him.

L to R: Jace, Gus, and Travis with our patient in Medical

After a while, it turned out our guy was just napping, so we let him sleep.

There are definitely things we need to work on as a team, but all in all it went pretty smoothly.

Next up, Doc is thawing out a pig for us to practice suturing, among other things, on.

Oh yeah, and we did finally get some color for sun set.