Drilling of IceCube hole 29 was completed on December 25. String 29 was deployed in the night of Dec 25/26.
The hose reel and other winches and equipment were moved to hole 39 on 12-27. The tower operations structure (TOS 1) was moved to hole 38 on 12-28. The move of equipment was overall rather straightforward and did not cause any problems or surprises. Several problems that were encountered during the drilling of the first hole were analyzed and measures were taken to fix them.
The deployment of the first hole went very well. The deployment timeline is best described in the depth-versus-time plot provided by Kurt Woschnagg. The string reached 2450m within less than 10 hours: 1 hour for startup, ~7 hours for the installation of 60 DOMs, ~1.5 hours for the final drop. Some crew of the day shift helped during the startup. The night shift consisted of 8 people who were very busy throughout the DOM installation due to the relatively fast pace.
The DOM testing group has passed 777 DOMs in 15 testing sessions, enough for 11 strings + 24 IceTop tanks. 25 failures have been recorded, including several with high or unstable noise rates, low/high gain, and seven flasher failures. Two DOMs slated for String 29 displayed significant gel crazing detected by visual inspection at time of deployment and were removed. 74 DOMs have not yet been tested. Testing is expected to wrap up near Jan. 4.
We have been able to take physics data using both strings (and IceTop)