Long day…. But big progress. Marcel and I flagged the planned power line path out to all of the major installations. Then, with such a beautiful day, we took the opportunity to use the helicopter to sling load some large power hubs out to the key “cities.” These are 700kg beasts! I can’t really believe we are sticking these on the ice, so they will be going on stable, thick ridged areas. Fortunately we can brute force them around a bit, as they are installed on top of 3 snowboards…… Pretty amazing to see a helicopter lifting such a load, swinging through the air.
After this mission we were back onboard at 3:30, but with so much to do and a nice day, I pushed for more. Assembled a team of 7 to go out and fix the 700m-road out to Met City…. Picks, shovels, and a bit of sweat (not too much!). Many hands make quick work…. And people are itching to get off the ship. Over the last few days, our colleagues on Federov have been cranking away at installing the MOSAIC distributed network. We’ve had a few communication and instrument issues, but somehow these are getting sorted out. Chris is a wiz and this stuff, and is able to log in from one station to the next to fix issues that arise, and Dave has been working diligently on this end to sort out communications issues and ensure that we have the right programs on this end to pull our data home. Big progress on our issues tonight, and I things are headed in the right direction. MOSAiC is starting to come together.
