Our Scott tents lined up in front of our snow machines.
Today we are practicing all the skills we’ll need out in Davis-Ward! Yesterday we gathered most of our gear and drove it down to an area close to Scott base (about a 10 minute drive from McMurdo base). After breakfast today, we spent 20 minutes piling on all our cold weather gear and headed out. Once we got to work, we immediately started shedding our cold weather layers – it will not be a balmy 30 degrees at Davis-Ward! At Scott base, our snow machines, shelter, food, and other supplies were waiting for us. We loaded everything onto 4 sleds to transport it to our nearby campsite. As a first time ANSMET team member, I have been very excited to drive the snow machines…and it is more fun than my wildest dreams!! We formed a line and drove through the snow. The cloudy conditions made it difficult to distinguish the land from the sky. Although this was slightly disorienting, I am in awe of how beautiful this place is. And Jim says the best is still yet to come when we get to find meteorites! Once we set up camp (and after everyone waited for me to figure out how the tie the trucker’s hitch to secure the tents), we took the snow machines into a snowy field to practice sweeps. In Davis-Ward, we will form a line on the blue ice to sweep areas for meteorites. Tomorrow we will head back to McMurdo!
-Emilie from the snowy, windy Shakedown site.
NOTE from rph: I want to give Emilie an extra shout-out for the time she put in practicing with our blogging hardware before the season began. I sent it to her a few weeks before they travelled and she diligently learned to make it work. The basic components are an Apple iPod Touch with bluetooth keyboard for content creation (writing, acquiring and shrinking images, composition) and software that lets it talk to an Iridium Go! device. The latter is basically a combo satellite modem and wifi hub, talking to the iPod and sending our content into the intertubes of the civilized world. The gear works; it literally brings the internet to the ends of the Earth. But after that the accolades diminish quickly. The software resembles something from 1992 (very “command-line-y”). It gives you just enough feedback to tell it’s working but not enough for you to avoid second-guessing ( “it’s not really working, is it”)? Bandwidth is another constraining issue. The maximum speed of an Iridium satellite uplink for data, under perfect conditions, is in the 8000-10,000 baud range; more typically for us it’s in the 2000- 5000 baud range. That’s comparable to the best modems of the mid 80’s, and while I trust all our readers can do the math, let me offer an example. The image Emilie sent, a highly compressed JPEG of limited color depth and 426 x 284 pixels, represents roughly 6700 bytes of data. Tiny, right? Most modern cameras output images that are at least several megabytes.
Under ideal circumstances, the math suggests Emilie’s image should take about 8-10 seconds to upload (the text is trivial). But because most of the iridium satellites are following low arcs on the horizon from our polar viewpoint, their bandwidth is reduced even further, and the required line-of-sight contact is of limited duration. Add the handshake between our device in the field and the satellites and their ground stations required for every step and the time multiplies accordingly. In practice it takes about a minute of continuous satellite uplink time for each 10 kb or data. To upload a typical image around 150 kb in size (think 640×480, 256 colors) takes about 10 minutes under perfect conditions. with content creation, dropped satellite connections and reboots, that very quickly becomes 20 minutes or more. Then comes the kicker; sometimes the Iridium Go! software doesn’t give you a conclusive “message sent” sign. So what does a dedicated ANSMET blogger do? Try again, of course.
I can see that Emilie sent the message above three times. I’m guessing it cost her 45 minutes or more total. While learning 1000 new things that day during the shakedown. Thank you, Emilie!