Visiting Some of the OTHER Science Around South Pole with a Raytheon Science Technician
Although I'm considered a scientist here at South Pole, there's a lot more going on here than I'm involved with. The station is divided up into sectors: clean air, dark sector, and RF (radio frequency) with each section having unique experiments and needs. For example, clean air is places so that it's upwind of everything else- you can't measure the atmosphere very effectively if the power plant's exhaust is blowing into your experimental zone. The same goes for the other sectors. Dark sector likes things dark and very quiet as far as radio traffic goes. RF is where all the satellite communcation takes place as well as experiments that are actively transmitting into the atmosphere or further away. I stay mostly in clean air because that's where my work is, but there are other techs who work in the other sectors taking care of the various experiments. Since the people who actually designed the experiments are typically university professors, they can't stay here year-round to take care of their equipment, so that's where the techs come in.
On this particular day (30 July 2004), I followed J. Dana Hrubes around on his rounds just to see some of the other projects. Normally, visiting other projects on your own is a very bad idea because if you break something or accidentally shut something off (or turn something on), you might end up wrecking a very, very expensive experiment. But Dana was happy to have me along, so these pages are pictures of that tour. I have to admit that a lot of the things he does are way over my head and although he did do a good job explaining each site, my memory is pretty short, so I'm summarizing as best as I can. However, you can read about each experiment with these links below as you're browsing through the pictures:
CUSP Projects (text only, Word document)
CUSP Projects (text with pictures, Word document)
The tour started off in ARO, outside to the AASTO telescope, the into the Dome to Skylab to the Cosray Lab and CUSP Lab, then finally out to the Dark Sector to the VLF (very low frequency site). We didn't visit everything on Dana's report and he doesn't see all these experiments every day. But the things here are pretty typical for a regular day for him. Also, yes, this is winter and the sun isn't up at this time. It was also pretty cold out this day, around -80C. But that's what makes it interesting, right?
Now for the links:
ARO and the infrared spectrometer
Dana also has a website: http://polar.home.att.net and if you'd like to know more, try over there!