Test Drilling

Not much was accomplished on our side today as we are waiting on the crate containing our equipment to get delivered. However, I did go out of the station and make it over to the Ice Cube Lab or ICL. My apologies to those that haven't followed the blog from previous years as I may not go into detail on all the things I am talking about, but feel free to look at previous posts or ask me for more info if you're interested.

This is a shot of the ICL that I took last year, and basically the second floor is full of computers to handle the IceCube experiment and the first floor has work benches. The building will eventually get buried as the snow drifts around it and was designed with that in mind.














This again is a photo from last year, it is looking from the roof of the ICL towards the drill camp.















I took this photo today and it shows all that remains of the drill camp. The installation of the IceCube experiment was completed last year so the drill camp only serves to support ARA, the project I work on.















Here you can see them test drilling a hole. The holes will be 200 meters deep and will be pumped dry and our about 6 inches in diameter. This is in contrast to the IceCube holes which were more like 2 feet in diameter and 2 kilometers deep and the strings had to be deployed within a matter of 30 hours or so as the holes would freeze in because the water wasn't pumped out. These holes are drilled by pumping hot water down the hoze and our the drill head which contains nozzles to melt the snow and ice. It sounds simple, but a lot of work has gone into it over the years to figure out the number of nozzles, orientation of the nozzles, flow rate, water temperature, descend rate...















Here you can see some of the heaters which apparently were intended for use in car washes, but now are used to heat the water for drilling.
















This photo shows the hot water tank and the entire drill train.















Adding snow to the hopper to be melted to supply hot water. They were using about 7 gallons of water a minute and getting about a meter of depth per minute.















Looking into the hopper which basically just has a hose spraying hot water onto the snow to melt it and supply the drill.
















This is a shot looking out towards the testbed site for ARA as well as ARA station 1. The testbed site is near the horizon in the middle of the photo. We installed it last year as more of a test of engineering than for actual physics, however it has been working without any major problems for almost a year now.















This is zoomed in a bit on the test bed site. If you look carefully, you can see a Pisten Bully and some people as well as a wind turbine. Eventually, if our project gets fully funded, we will need stations to be self powered, so we are looking at using wind turbines and solar panels to supply our power needs. The problem with solar is it only works half the year. The problem with wind is it isn't constant or predictable and we haven't managed to find a turbine that can survive in these conditions. They installed the wind turbine at the test bed recently to see if we get any electromagnetic interference from having the turbine so close to our radio antennas.














This is a photo of ARA station 1. In it you can see a van with tracks, some people, a sea container that has been re-purposed into a meeting space, a 3000 gallon fuel tank and a trenching machine. They are going full speed on getting the site ready for deployment and may have it ready by early next week.















A shot of the South Pole Telescope in an orientation that I don't remember seeing before.