The early part of last week at the Pole was a little quiet, with just some troubleshooting stemming from a software crash. But then things picked up. It was the time of year when the flags around the ceremonial Pole are swapped out for fresh ones. These flags take quite a beating from the elements […]
IceCube’s winterovers spent some time last week on troubleshooting activities at the IceCube Lab, but they didn’t get there in the vehicle above. No one is going anywhere quickly in that truck—a “little bit” of digging out might be required first. Winterover Celas snapped that photo along with the other images below while hiking out […]
It was a fairly calm week at the Pole. The winterovers were again sent to the ICL to cover both IceAct telescopes. These telescopes are designed to detect Cherenkov light from cosmic rays in the atmosphere but had to be covered before a whiteout at the South Pole. The South Pole Art Gallery was graced […]
Yes, you read that right. Back in 2019, Elaine Krebs was selected as the next PolarTREC educator to work with IceCube’s South Pole crew, with deployment set for 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, deployment was delayed to 2022. Now, Elaine will finally embark on her journey to the South Pole, where she will […]
As the Antarctic winter draws to a close, our winterovers picked up some extra responsibility. Last week opened with a Zoom meeting between the current winterovers and the recruits for next year, during which Moreno and Celas shared their experiences, words of advice, and warnings about the South Pole delicacies. Later in the week, they […]
The horizon at the South Pole continues to slowly brighten with every passing day. Unfortunately, the brownouts and blackouts that had occurred the prior week at the Pole also continued, but—again—all was brought back to normal with no major problems resulting. Also last week, IceCube winterover Moreno, in conjunction with Concordia Station, launched a radio-sounding […]
Although the skies were cloudy, the moon shone bright over the IceCube Lab (ICL) last week. IceCube winterovers were paged during the week for a misbehaving DOM, which required a trip out to the ICL (bonus: some nice moonlit photos), but in general it was a relatively calm week on the detector side of things. […]
Last week was action-packed at the South Pole. The beginning of the week had IceCube’s winterovers busy with diagnosing and troubleshooting some computer issues, which required a couple of visits to the IceCube Lab (ICL). They took advantage of these visits to also perform a few maintenance tasks at the ICL while they were there. […]
Although it is still night at the South Pole, the sun is making a slow rise toward the horizon, and it’s getting close to twilight. Some folks are excited to see the sun again, while others mourn the end of winter. But it will take weeks for the sun to fully rise over the horizon, […]
Last week at the Pole was restful—finally. No Polympics or other competitive sporting events, no emergency response training, no outreach talks…and a super-quiet detector. The IceCube detector’s uptime was 99.95%, its maximum value given small downtimes required for maintenance and operation. The night skies on the other hand were not so quiet. A major solar […]