Why are things so sporadic?

The updates to this blog are a bit sporadic. This is due largely to the work schedule and the satellite schedule. The pole operates on the NZ time zone which is 5 hours behind central time. For us satellite rise is at aout 7:00am and it sets at about 2:00pm. That made things a bit tough for me today as I was carting gear all over the pole.

A word about satellites. The only means of communication with the pole is via satellite. There are three main families of satellite for use: Iridium, GOES, TDRSS.

The Iridium system is actually a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit. They were launched back in the mid 1990s as a platform for replacing wired communication systems. It was never economically viable, yet somehow still operates. Rumor has it there's a three letter agency involved. In any case, at least one of the satellites is visible at all times, but they are slow and expensive to use. However, we can send small email messages over this system any time. That's handy. It seems that in this case "if you build it, they will come" is also part of the equation and so some money is now
actually flowing (certainly we send our share).

The main satellite is GOES-3 an old weather satellite that's out of fuel and so drifts into view of the pole for about seven hours per day. During that time we enjoy really slow internet access. It's slower than the broadband you're probably using to read this, but it's better than nothing.

The third system is TDRSS (pronounced tee dris). These are actual communications satellites and as such are fast. We use these to transmit bulk science data back to the northern hemisphere. For IceCube, that means about 70 GB/day. It is also used for normal internet access, but that traffic has lower priority, so it's still slow. We used to use TDRSS F1 for this. However, that satellite lost vacuum in its last transmitter about a month ago (question: you're in space, where did the vacuum go? :-) ). So now we use a newer TDRSS satellite (F6), but that's primarily a NASA bird, so we can only use it when they're not which means that you never quite know when you will have a time slot. We also have it for less time (just as well, I think we pay like $160/minute or something - and you thought ATT was bad), but it's much faster so we still get the same amount of data across.

An added bonus is that when GOES and TDRSS are visible, we can actually make phone calls. These phone calls appear to originate in Denver, so it's not even an international call. All you need is a calling card.

It's a far cry from the old days, that's for sure.