A bright sun and clear skies were just the ticket for capturing this image of the IceCube Lab (ICL) at the South Pole last week. The photo was actually taken at 3:00 am! Athough the sun’s out all the time now, that early hour happened to be ideal for outdoor lighting conditions. This summer is […]
The new year started off on a quiet note at the South Pole. Last week, with a well-behaved IceCube detector and many holiday celebrations behind them, the winterover crew enjoyed a relatively quiet week, with some nice weather and perhaps a little more free time on their hands. They spent some of that time continuing […]
Everyone at the South Pole station congregated outside last week for a nice holiday group photo. While the temperatures at the Pole are normally their warmest in December and January, it was still cold out there. Hard to tell from the photo as there are plenty of folks not wearing hats and a few here […]
The South Pole station remains a busy place these days. Last week saw lots of activity for IceCube’s winterovers and summer crew, from unpacking cargo and upgrading equipment at the IceCube Lab (ICL) to continued ERT training as well as multiple seasonal celebrations. Festivities included a summer solstice observance, a karaoke/talent show, and a special […]
What a busy week! IceCube’s winterovers did some housecleaning and equipment testing at the IceCube Lab, had continued ERT training (including handling patients and doing X-rays in the clinic), and gave a presentation on IceCube to a packed galley for the station’s Thursday Night Science Lecture. Last week also saw the long-awaited arrival of the […]
Thai engineer Chana Sinsabvarodom was recently selected to work on the IceCube Upgrade project, which will install seven more densely instrumented strings of light sensors near the center of the IceCube array at the South Pole. The IceCube Upgrade will significantly enhance IceCube’s sensitivity to lower-energy neutrinos, improve the fidelity of all past and future […]
As one of the most powerful classes of explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have long been considered a possible astrophysical source of neutrinos—tiny “ghostlike” particles that travel through space and large amounts of matter unhindered. These high-energy neutrinos are of particular interest to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigaton-scale neutrino detector at the […]
Winterovers at the South Pole are subjected to lots of training—some of it is in preparation before they reach the Pole but much of it is while they’re on site. It’s a small community that winters over at the South Pole, and they are essentially isolated from the rest of the world throughout the dark […]
Still to this day, the origins of cosmic rays—the astrophysical objects that produce and accelerate cosmic rays—remain to be identified. However, high-energy neutrinos, tiny, nearly massless particles, may be the key to solving this long-standing mystery. At the South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory occupies a cubic kilometer of ice in search of high-energy neutrinos […]
A group of scientists tasked with advising the federal government’s investments in particle physics research is recommending that the United States fund a planned expansion (dubbed IceCube-Gen2) of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an international scientific collaboration operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the South Pole. […]