Settled in

So after a hectic few days of travel, I finally arrived at the pole. We got in around 10:00pm. Since I'd been here before, and it was late, I was spared the obligatory briefing. It really boils down to a couple of basic things: recycling and health. Since the pole is at an elevation of ~10,000 feet, they want you to pay careful attention to your health for a few days. It takes some time for your body to adapt to the elevation and altitude sickness is a risk. Usually the effects are mild and treatable with oxygen if they get too bad. Every once in a while, though, they MedEvac someone who gets a more severe variety.

This time around I got assigned a room in a different part of the station. It's actually bigger than my room on the last trip - I can't touch opposite walls at the same time. In the spring of 2012, I was at a work meeting in Berkely, but had a chance to swing down and tour Alcatraz. I did a quick check of the solitary confinement cells and they are pretty much exactly the same size as the room I had on the last trip. Of course, we can turn the lights on and off, and leave when we want to.

The station is really different this time around. In 2009, the IceCube project was in the full swing of drilling operations. Once the drill was started, it needed to run 24x7, so there were enough 'cubers on station to keep the drill running and a host of others testing instruments and other sciency stuff. That was a solid 50 people throughout the whole season. The support contractor also kept a fair number of people available to help out when and where needed, which was necessary since we were usually moving a lot things in and out. The total station population would fluctuate between 250-290 people going pretty much 24x7.

This time, the population fluctuates between 150-170. There's no night shift and it's just generally quiet.

Now that I'm finally here, I actually have useful work to do, so I can get settled into a routine. Most of the routine revolves around meal time. At this time of the year, in terms of daylight, it is always 2:00 in the afternoon. The Sun basically just circles around the station. So you don't have a lot of the typical visual cues to tell you what time of day it might be. The fixed meal times tend to keep you on some sort of regular schedule. Probably the hardest thing to keep track of is what day it is. Given our location, we can pick our favorite time zone to operate in. The station runs on New Zealand time since all of our cargo flights originate from there. That means we're on the other side of the international date line. Time of day runs five hours behind central standard time. Since you're basically working every day, they all sort of blur together and you're shifted a day ahead of the North which adds to the mix.

So far this trip it's been pretty good. The IceCube team on station is very cohesive and hard working. We have had some great talks. It turns out that the director of University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) is a former astronouat. He was on station and talked about some of his experiences in space with the shuttle and the ISS. For a geek like me, it doesn't get much cooler than that. There is also a science group working on a telescope at a location called Ridge A. Ridge A is at about 13,000 feet elevation and colder than the pole. They want the thing to run year round, so they have done a lot of work to reduce power usage. They also have to keep things small since they need to fit through the door of a small aircraft. It was a pretty interesting talk.

At this point, it's hard to believe that in nine days I'll be starting the return trip home!