Three
southpole .....
Later: Retrograde
Earlier: Transitions
Wednesday, Jan. 12 2011 1:12 a.m. UTC
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Today will probably be another short post since it’s getting late in the satellite pass. I’ve been outside three times already today — first for a morning jog out to the IceCube laboratory (ICL), then to take the obligatory “hero shots” out at the Pole markers (there is a geographic pole marker, which moves every year as the ice, with the Station and everything else, gradually glides towards some distant oblivion in the Southern Ocean; and the Ceremonial Pole a few dozen meters away which is ringed with the flags of signatories of the Antarctic Treaty). Finally, I went out to meet Mark D., a new collaborator from Belgium who I hadn’t met before. On his plane were half a dozen “DVs” — Distinguished Visitors, which in this case included reporters from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic, which may stroll by here any moment.
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It was interesting going out to the ICL and seeing all of the strings cabled to computers there. It looks quite well organized and impressive to me, very 21st Century, and I thought of how far we’ve come since the AMANDA days in the 1990s when we ran everything off of a Macintosh desktop computer. We have perhaps several thousand times as much computing power on the Ice now, and though there are plenty of loose ends and improvements to be made, I think the overall design is correspondingly more advanced, robust and complete.
Yesterday we collected some test data to pave the way for the first runs of the full 86-string detector, which required some trial and error but which were ultimately successful. Progress is being made, though schedules might be a bit tight if we are going to get the first full runs in before I leave in little over a week (!).
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Later: Retrograde
Earlier: Transitions