Ultimately, our instrument only works when it is buried in the ice. We drill out antenna holes (100 m deep) using a BigRAID drill. But what if you want shallower holes for testing, calibration, and different types of radio neutrino. I give you the melting probe.
It's just a tube that gets hot and melts the snow. The water diffuses into the ice and you are left with a dry hole up to 30 meters deep. It was tested last year and it got stuck due to a failure of a communication connector. This year, it is all fixed.
Science Team 2 headed out to site 15 to make some holes that will be used to measure the refractive index of the ice. The day started beautiful and clear (cold, but clear). It was the last day of the flight period, so lots of people were leaving and the station population is down from 41 to 31. No more planes will come until August.
The probe worked well (once we figured out the generator) and we were able to melt two holes down to ~10 meters in ~ 2 hours per hole. We are building confidence in the probe and over the next few days we are going to test how far down we can actually get.
Good first day in the field for the new team members, but when the clouds rolled in after lunch it definitely felt cold.
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| Big machines clearing snow |
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| Jethro towing scientific equipment |
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