Today's science flight canceled

For the third ANTCI science flight, the plan is to take off after midnight and fly onto the Antarctic plateau and then go as far north as possible (i.e., until we have a little more than 1/2 a tank of gas, so you have enough to get back home). Reason we are doing this in the middle of the "night" is that the UV rays from the Sun play a key role in the chemistry we are looking at. So we wanted to do a comparison between low and high Sun conditions. This planned flight is the low Sun flight. We should be able to get to a latitude of about 75 degrees and at that time of the "night", the Sun is about 6 degrees above the horizon. Then a day or so later we will go to the same location in the middle of the day, and the Sun will be about 30 degrees higher.

While the Twin Otter is at this northerly location, the plane will land and we will collect some snow samples and also measure the gases coming out of the snow. About 20 minutes later the Otter will take off and head back to McMurdo. The photo on the right show some important notices on the door of our aircraft: "Do not open door with flaps extended", because the with the flaps down the door could damage the flaps. And "This aircraft is operating without a certificate of airworthiness". This just means that all the stuff we are hanging from the windows and top and bottom of the plane mean it is no longer FAA certified. The plane is still quite safe and will be regain it's certification as soon as we take all of our stuff off the plane. This normal for research aircraft. Once we found out the flight was canceled. We took the opportunity to take a closer look at some of the instruments that have been causing us some problems. Fred and Lee worked on the OH instrument, and think they have it working much better now. Doug and Will double checked that they did not have any leaks in their tubing and practiced snow NO sampling. Glenn replaced a hard disk that had crashed on the last flight. This is a bit of a concern for all of us as the plane is unpressurized and we got up to 14,000 ft last flight. Hoping that this is a one time only failure. Fred has planes to take the Otter up to 18,000 ft (with oxygen for everyone), so that will be an interesting test. Jim Crawford (shown on the phone, left) and I took the Laser Altimeter out of the plane and figured out how to change some of the settings to slow down the data rate and convert output from meters to feet (since aircraft convention for altitude is feet). After a bit of trying, we finally figured out how to "talk" to the instrument and change the settings. So we should get better data on next flight. Photo of the guy with the funny T-Shirt is Andreas. He is a graduate student of Don Blake's at the University of California - Irvine. Andreas and I have been on a bunch of field missions to Greenland in the past few years so, and I can tell you that even if he is annoying, he works pretty hard. He recently started a blog: http://annoyinganteater.blogspot.com, check it out if you have the time. Otherwise, tomorrow is November 24th (Thanksgiving back in the States), but here at McMurdo Station, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving on Saturday, so it does not interfere with the work week. Not so nice, but it really doesn't matter that much since the important thing is that we are not going to be able to celebrate Thanksgiving with our families (a big deal for me). So we will all be thinking of what we are missing, and also what we have to be thankful for.