As ARIANNA develops it will become an array of 900+ stations seperated by 1km in a grid in order to catch more neutrinos (even with that we expect to see only 40 in one 6-month season). In order to access the microcomputers in each station and to transmit data, each station will be connected through an AFAR radio link to McMurdo. The link has a relay station at our base camp (loctaion of station #1) and a relay station on Mt. Discovery, the later was not working until Tuesday 12/6. Since the snow drifts and falls enough to cover these small towers each year, the Raytheon communications and rigger crew had to come out and pull their tower out of the snow and set it up again on top of the snow for this year. Here's a shot of them doing final adjustments after they did that on Saturday 12/3.
Once the AFAR relay links were working we tested how far away we can put station #2. So Joulien and I trudged a sled of equipment out to the end of a 1km line which had been checked for crevasses (there are 10+ flags on bamboo poles every 100meters, though you can only see the first few). We were happy to see the radio link is strong at that distance. The weather had changed, and still the photos do not show the 10mph chilling wind. Here you can see Mt. Discovery on the right and our camp ahead in the distance. Walking far from camp made being on the ice shelf feel even more real.
A couple days later the weather cleared up enough for a midnight helicopter visit. You can see here the lowest point in the sky the sun gets to here these days. I'm so glad someone invented helicopters...like a milling machine, they take something very rotational and make it linear. Neat.
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