Test flight tomorrow morning

Seems like Murphy's Law is alive and well here on the Ice Runway. Things are still going pretty well, but today we have had a few bumps in the road. This morning we were trying to run most of the instruments at the same time and found out that the ground power unit we have down here is not quite putting enough power (at a lower voltage), less power than it is rated for. As a consequence we were concerned that we will not be able to have all the instruments up and running at the same time during our pre-flight warm up tomorrow. The aircraft guys are looking into this, and in the meantime, we are going to try use a 50 ft extension cord or two running from our Jamesway Laboratory to the aircraft. We will see how it goes tomorrow. Other excitement today was that the big fuel truck game to refill the tank the gasoline stove in our Jamesway. It is not really that exciting, but I like to see all the different big trucks that are around here. In a future post I will try to include a photo of a different antarctic vehicle each day. Here is the photo of the ANTCI lab space in room 310 of the Crary Lab. This is where I hang out and look out the window while I send out the blog. Hopefully soon I will be working on some data. It is a nice view towards the South from which I can easily see planes take-off and land on the ice runway. Here is a photo of a helicopter flying over to the Dry Valleys. Today I also learned that over 3,000 people worked at the U.S. Antarctic stations (McMurdo, Palmer, and South Pole) last year. And approximately 90% of them traveled through New Zealand (the rest came by ship or flew from Punta Arenas, Chile). These folks orgininated from 49 states, about 80% were here in the austral summer season, the rest wintered over. The average age was 38 years old and more than 1/3 were female. There were more than 150 different science projects and over 600 research personnel performed research. If you are intersted in learning more about working down here, check out: http://www.polar.org/