Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The 3rd week on ice was extremely busy so this post will be short as I need to get up earlier tomorrow morning to deal with many things. Despite quite a lot of frustration, the important progress we made included:
- All lidar boxes were finally moved into the Arrival Heights Kiwi’s laboratory on December 1st, 2010;
- two power consoles were fixed and powered up successfully, including the seawater-moisture damaged one;
- the 372-nm laser was successfully up running at our first try to fire it up;
- and the overall structure of lidar setup emerged.
An exciting event was a visit by our NSF program manager, Dr. Vladimir Papitashvili, on Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Dr. Vladimir Papitashvili visited the A-130 lidar team at Arrival Heights on December 2, 2010, and he had a good discussion with Xinzhao as caught in the photo taken by John Smith.
A happy photo of A-130 lidar team with Dr. Papitashvili. The gentleman on the left with bright green jacket is Scott Base’s engineer manager Johno Leitch. He and his engineers gave us a big help in moving lidar boxes and modifying the laboratory. The lidar setup is partially
Smile on everyone after both power consoles (shown) were successfully powered up and tested. Considerable cleaning and repairing work led to this result. From the left are Wentao Huang, Weichun Fong, Ross (Electrician), Xinzhao, Rose (Electrician), and John Smith. We really would like to pay our respect and gratitude to Doug Gustavson, an Electrical Engineer of Light Age, Inc., who gave us good advice during the repairing procedure.
Mr. Erebus on the Ross Island, which is an active volcano.
A shot at the Arrival Heights with Mt. Erebus in the background. The white building is an American Building, while the green one is the Kiwi building where our lidar is being installed. Two walking “red bears” are Wentao and Weichun.
Pressure ridge near Ross Island
Not every day is sunny and nice. Here is a shot when a storm was coming. Looking through Crary library windows, the airplanes at the ice runway were nearly buried in the storm, but mountains in the background were still showing a bit light. We had quite a few bad days like this.
All the best wishes to you for a wonderful December!
Sincerely,
Xinzhao
