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 […]
A month ago, the Seattle Community Summer Study Workshop—July 17-26, 2022, at the University of Washington—brought together over a thousand scientists in one of the final steps of the Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise. The meetings and accompanying white papers put the cherry on top of a period of collaborative work setting a vision for […]
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 […]
Gravitational waves (GWs) are a signature for some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, which cause ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light. These events, spurred by massive accelerating objects, act as cosmic messengers that carry with them clues to their origins. They are also probable sources for highly energetic […]
For over 20 years, physicists have performed experiments that hint at the existence of an elusive fourth type of neutrino, the “sterile” neutrino. Neutrinos—tiny, almost massless particles—are also known as “ghost particles” because they rarely interact with the matter they travel through. On the other hand, the appropriately named sterile neutrino does not interact with […]
Although high-energy cosmic rays have long been observed arriving at Earth, their origins have eluded researchers for years. The key may lie in neutrinos, which are tiny, nearly massless particles that can travel along a straight path from their sources. High-energy neutrinos that originate from outside our solar system are called cosmic neutrinos, which can […]
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. […]