12-23-11

Yesterday was a busy day for most the people working on ARA. The drillers finished drilling the last hole at about 10:30 at night after getting started at around 7:30 in the morning. We also had to go retrieve and repair the chariot that was used in today's Race Around the World. I spent a good chunk of time just shoveling out the snow that had filled the inside of the chariot. I also did some antenna assembly.


Here you can see one side of the lower level of the ICL. We have pretty much taken it over as IceCube is complete.















This is a photo I may have posted a couple days ago, but on the right side of the image there are two smaller black buildings. The one in front of the silver column is the old bathroom and the larger one to the right is the new bathroom which was probably about 80 degrees inside heated only by the sun on a day like the one in the photo below. I've include photos of the bathroom below for those interested.















































Here you can see the antenna I finished assembling. Basically we had to run the cable through the antenna before we put the connectors on one end because the connectors are too big to fit through the center of the antenna. I also put some pieces to provide strain relief on the cables at the ends of the antennas.














Here is one antenna before we shipped it from Hawaii. These antennas were designed in Hawaii, but we had our collaborators in Taiwan build them because we simply did not have time.