Well, the title of this post is a double entendre. First off, I am leaving Antarctica to return home on the 21st. Assuming all goes well, I should be back home right around Christmas time. There are certain things I am looking forward to, such as my own room and a bed that does not feel like a sack of potatoes, but I'll miss the comraderie and excitement of working down here on the ice. That an I'm not really looking forward to another 3 day trip back or returning my ECW socks.
I was also asked about how the payloads return to earth. Good question. Between the balloon and the payload is a parachute. Part of the difficulty of timing a launch is to wait for the high altitude winds to set up in an anti-cyclone such that the balloons will orbit the pole. Tracking the balloons with GPS (we have 3), the hope is that the balloon will circle the earth, and then once over a suitable recovery location, the abort commend is sent. This triggers a couple of explosive bolts that drop the payload from the balloon (which is not reusable and is considered a $200,000 expendible plastic bag), which parachutes back to earth. During this process a plane circles around the predicted landing area, to make sure it does not hit anything vital (usually this is taken care of by dropping it over somewhere desolate, like this entire continenet). There are some crush pads installed under the gondola, such as to soften the final impact, but some delicate parts like the solar panels will break, and often the entire payload falls over, or is dragged by the parachute for a while. After all this, the recovery team goes in a retrieves the vital parts (our data, and hopefully telescope), and marks the location for full retrival later. Oh yeah, if it falls in the ocean, you get to write a proposal again, because your experiment and all your data just went the way of Atlantis. Better luck next year.
Now, ANITA is currently on a tour of the South Pole, as visible on thier
tracking website. Ryan whipped up that pretty map during the week downtime when they failed those 6 previous launch attempts.
The SBI payload sucessfully completed its hang test, which is basically a pre-flight checkout, and are officially ready for launch. As only two people are required to launch, the two most experienced members, Bliss and Pietro are staying, while Matt and I return this Thursday. I'll keep the blog updated on my return home.
Here are a few shots of the finished SBI project and the 2006 Antarctic Team:
