The drilling of the first hole of the season started on Monday, December 19, 2005. The new firn drill was used and performed as expected. After firn drilling was complete the firn drill was removed and the drill tip, weight stacks, and drill head were assembled and prepared for ice drilling. Subsequently there was a three-day delay in the start of ice drilling to address issues with the programmable drives and the calibration of the load cells.
Drilling into the ice began on Friday, December 23, 2005. Initial drilling progressed reasonably well with the drilling crew actively addressing issues from heater efficiency tuning to level wind performance.
Drilling speeds were in line with the rates determined by models. The goal was to produce a hole with a 45-hour lifetime to address the schedule uncertainties after reaming including: drill head and weight stack extraction; hole logging; deployment preparation; and finally deployment. Drilling speeds routinely exceeded 1.3 meters per minute.
The first hole was a challenge. The issues with the drives and control system are understood and the experience gained is plentiful giving increased confidence that the second hole will hopefully be less challenging from the trouble-shooting standpoint. The drill crews were given a day off after drilling to rest in preparation for the next hole. Hole to hole move was scheduled to begin on the evening of December 26th and the second hole is scheduled to commence in the next few days.
The temporary counting house is fully operational and is maintained by Karthik Pandian and Darryn Schneider. Web cams are now operational at the IceCube drill site and access is available within the South Pole intranet.