03 March 2004 Click image for full size!
This is another thing that we do during the week- prep our ozone sondes. The machine in the back is the ozone generator that conditions the pump in the sonde to get it ready for calibration. I think that ozone since it's pretty reactive needs to be involved in the process. This is the main body of the sonde, which detects ozone using a wet cell anode/cathode tubes that you can see attached to the metal box. Air is pumped into the cathode and as ozone concentration changes, the current from the cell changes and this signal is radioed back to the ground station and recorded for the duration of the flight. In case you're wondering, the balloons we launch go about 35 km up and probably go anywhere from 20 to 70 km away from the station, usually too far away to recover, but sometimes someone happens to be out there and a few come back. But there are probably thousands of sondes littering the glacial plateau out there!