Population and Deployments: Weather conditions in McMurdo and at the South Pole Station improved and the LC130 schedule is in full swing. Population is now on schedule with 49 of a planned 50 IceCube team members at the station. Deliveries of fuel and cargo are in much better shape than one week ago. As an indication, the last flight in on Nov 19 was P040, so there have been 32 flights in the six-day work-week starting Nov. 12.
Regular shifts and schedules for the construction season are taking place. One of the issues is the proximity of the SPASE array to one of the proposed IceCube holes. SPASE is the South Pole Air Shower Experiment a large-area air shower array established at the geographic South Pole for the detection of cosmic rays with primary energies above 50 TeV. A closer look indicated that that the building and the remaining components of SPASE would not interfere with deployment of the remainder of the planned 80 IceCube strings.
Safety: The organization of IceCube Safety Equipment and Supplies is under way at the ICL and the Drill Camp. We need to organize ourselves and prepare for the upcoming Safety Tours by the RPSC Rescue Teams. These teams want to familiarize themselves with the layouts of our sites and with what safety equipment we would have available for them in the event of an emergency. We have formed a Multiple Casualty Drill Planning Team with people from IceCube and the Raytheon Polar Services Company (RPSC). At the end of November, we will have a Multiple Casualty Drill at a couple of our IceCube sites. IceCube will practice their evacuation procedures and the RPSC rescue teams will be practicing their procedures as well. We always learn a few things; mainly we need to continue to keep our "Heads in the Safety Game."
Logistics: Of the approximately 104,000 lbs of IceCube repair or upgrade cargo scheduled for delivery to Pole week ending November 17, we had about 74,000 delivered. All IceTop tanks for the 07-08 season have been delivered. Various pieces of equipment are ready to be shipped from the station back to the USA or Europe for repair or recycling. They are staged in the Do Not Freeze cargo storage facility.
Drill Camp Assembly and Preparations for Drilling: We completed the firn hole for the first hole on Saturday Nov 17 and now have access holes for the first and second holes of the season. The new Linux computer system is up and running and the new software is now operational.
Operations are underway to melt seed water using the vertical turbine pumps. We expect to start setting up the tower site at hole 1 on Monday Nov 18.
String Installation: String installation begins after the first hole is completed.
DOM Testing: The initial DOM testers arrived at Pole on Nov 12 (6 days later than planned due to bad weather in McM). Despite the late arrival, startup proceeded smoothly with Test Cycle 1 starting on schedule Nov 14 with 24 IceTop DOMs. The cycle finished on Nov 16 with 22 good DOMs delivered to IceTop and 2 to re-test. Test cycle 2 initiated on schedule Nov 17 with 64 DOMs that were removed from B2. Test Cycle 3 is scheduled to begin on Nov 20.
DOM inventory - 88 DOMs have been removed from storage for test (this is painful work). There remain approximately 120 additional DOMs in storage that will be removed for the next 3 - 5 test cycles. 128 new DOMs arrived from McMurdo this week. These DOMs wintered in McMurdo and the outside packaging looks good which indicates proper storage. The DOM test area has been graded flat and cleaned up very nicely. Once the Tower Operation Structures (TOSs) are moved early next week the DOM test area will be completely ready for future DOM test movements. There is no shortage of DOMs for test, though we are hopeful that the balance of IceTop DOMs will arrive on schedule next week.
Engineering and Cable support: Preparations are underway to enable pulling surface cables into the IceCube Lab (ICL). The ICL is in good shape and we will now start the process of organizing the first floor layout. Five of eight surface cables scheduled for delivery this week arrived at Pole. In addition, 2 additional cables will arrive later this week. Cable trenching is scheduled to start next week.
IceTop: The plan for this season calls for installing 28 tanks at 14 stations, which will give a total of 40 IceTop stations enclosing an area of 0.37 square kilometers. All tanks are on station, most have been uncrated and eight are ready to be set in trenches. Trenches for tanks are ready at four locations, including station 54 shown in the photo above. The first DOM test cycle yielded 22 A-DOMs for IceTop. All twenty Freeze Control Units (FCUs) have been retrieved from tanks deployed last year and returned to the IceTop blue building for refurbishment and re-use this season. Testing of the retrieved FCUs has begun. Filter elements for the IceTop filter unit have arrived and will be installed in PHS this week. The first tanks are scheduled to be filled on December 5.
Computer hardware support
IT: All cargo required to fix the existing taping system has arrived. We will install a humidifier that should help with taping. The drill camp network is operational and connected to the station network. A significant network outage caused a disruption to DOM testing. The station IT team worked overtime to ensure this problem was fixed as quickly as possible. The cause of the disruption has yet to be identified, though is likely to have been caused by a fiber failure.
ICL: The AMANDA-IceCube synchronization hub and sync crate have been relocated in preparation for installation of in-ice hubs. Thanks to the AMANDA/TWR team for moving these pieces of equipment. Work is ongoing to reconfigure the IceTop power supplies and final preparation of the hub racks for host installation. This will be completed in the coming week.
AMANDA Integration
The first phase of on-ice AMANDA work, which ends November 26, has several goals: