Yosh Control to Major Tom

Halfway to Lunar Habitat
NASA is working on, I believe, four different projects down here. Most recently a NASA group in collaboration with ILC Dover and the NSF arrived to test a new portable shelter for remote Antarctic field sites. In essence, the project has developed a durable tent intended to supersede Jamesways.

Jamesways, a vestige from the Korean War, are buildings in a box. Crates can be airdropped. Inside of the crates are canvas, some straps, some screws and nails, a bit of lumber. The crate itself is then broken down. The base serves as a floor (slightly elevated), and other pieces of wood serve as a frame. The canvas is stretched taut over this frame, and fin. Most ingeniously, a single Jamesway can stand alone - a half-cylinder about fifteen feet long, nine feet high - or it can be lengthened with other Jamesways. The sky is the limit.

So here is NASA with a lighter version, inflatable, similarly adaptable. The Antarctic version serves as a prototype for potential lunar habitation. I have learned that NASA intends to establish a lunar station by 2024. More information is available online, I'm sure, but I can't vouch for its trustworthiness. (Nor do I vouch for my own.) The Antarctic habitat takes six minutes to inflate, six to deflate. There are two layers of material, and between them the air is pressurized. This supports the structure. It is designed to withstand 100 knot (~110mph) winds from any direction. It is cozy inside. Free-floating space stations inspired by this design, another possibility under consideration, would be full cylinders. In space, no one can hear you scream. But also, in space, there is no up or down.

Swedish Infiltration
On Friday evening the ice breaker Oden docked and the crew came ashore. Monday morning it disembarked to break more ice and widen the channel.

Saturday night as I walked from the cafeteria to my room I passed the ATM. Four Swedish men from the Oden wearing bright blue jumpsuits with yellow reflective stripes - deck suits - huddled around the machine and spoke rapidly over each other: "Yash yash yosh yash--"Yash yash--"Yosh yash yosh."

That's how it sounded, anyway.

Ten minutes later I walked from the store to my room and in front of the same ATM was a new group of Swedish men. One of them wore short shorts and a red t-shirt designed like a sports jersey on back:

de puta madre
69

On Sunday I took a tour of the Oden. We started outside of the gift shop, walked down a hall to the bar and dining room, across the hall to a recreation and exercise room, up a spiral staircase to the sauna (cushions, a table, a cutting board with cheese knife), up farther to an open cabin - plush - and up finally six more stories to room 600, the Styrhytt, where the captain and first mates navigate and where the scientists on-board for research rendezvous to discuss new findings and new tacks. Room 600 is the bridge, and it is a stunning space about 20m above water level. The Oden is a heavily modernized ice breaker with radar designed to analyze the ice, computerized GPS charts, a multi-beam scanner that measures underwater topography in real-time (a swath twice as wide as the depth, the information displayed visually, a 3D model), water jets below the bow to decrease friction on the ice top, and a bunch of other stuff I didn't understand, forget, or both. What I do remember, and what I consider most impressive, are the keeling tanks, one on port side and one on starboard toward the stern of the boat. Each tank can hold 80 tons of water - something like 20,000 gallons. The tanks are used both as ballast as fuel burns off and as added weight during ice breaking. (The sides of the hull, it seems, come into play just as much as the front.) The two tanks are connected by a massive pipe, and centered in the pipe is a massive propeller that can move this water - all eighty tons - from one tank to the other in fifteen seconds.

Yash Yosh!

Straight from the Top of My Dome
This evening after work a coworker and I got a tour of the NASA radar dome up on the hill, a big white mylar hulk described by one engineer as the golf ball in the sky. One of NASA's central concerns down here is monitoring polar satellites - satellites that orbit around both poles. These are used primarily to measure meteorological data and map out the continent. (NASA was the first to map Antarctica and is now working on finer and finer detail, often in collaboration with other groups.) The dish tracks satellites from when they come into view on one horizon until they disappear over the other horizon. It currently follows eight satellites, but has the capacity to follow twenty. Each satellite completes a full orbit in about 90 minutes. (That's at least - at least - 100mph.) While the dish is focused on the satellite it is receiving an almost continuous stream of data gathered over the last orbit. This is then sent to Fairbanks, Alaska where the University analyzes the data with a supercomputer cluster. Eventually, the information makes its way back to the NASA center on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The dish is ten meters across and doesn't photograph well. But I don't photograph well, either. I prefer to be out of focus, and mysterious, like a satellite. Victoria and I were up top with Rex; his partner, Nik, operated the dish from down below and spun it around for us. It moves with impressive, scary quickness. Before moving a horn sounds twice and a yellow siren starts flashing. After the display of motion we drove back down to the control center and Rex showed us how to move the dish around. All he did was drag a bar with the mouse cursor. Above the computer monitor is a live feed from the dome, and, there, sure enough, the dish spun about, dipped, rose. Amazing stuff. The tour ended in the server room where all of the information is recorded and backed-up. The server room is also where those NASA employees keep their humidor, replete.

One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.