I guess I need to start out by posting a photo of the ice runway from McMurdo Station as this didn’t get into the last post. It is located a few miles from McMurdo, operates from October to December until the sea ice begins to break up.
The Ice Runway as seen from McMurdo Station |
The last couple of days on Ice (slang: The Ice refers to any place and every place in Antarctica) the team spent pulling old equipment out of racks, packing the equipment for return to the US as well as populating the racks with the new equipment. The majority of ground station equipment in our operations on the 1st floor of the Joint Space Operations Center (JSOC) building and building 71 below the radome will be shipped back to Wallops Flight Facility for reuse or excess property disposal. A good deal of materials (old racks, cabling, etc.) is being sorted for recycling—NSF’s recycling program is a topic for a later post. The pictures below provide a couple different views of the radome, building 71 and the JSOC.
The MGS radome, building 71, and McMurdo Station down below on the left |
The radome as seen from town |
The JSOC
The entrance to the NASA area |
HTSI/William Kambarn (left) and LJT/Chuck Bradford perform manlift battery maintenance inside the radome |
All of our cargo has either been received at McMurdo, except scaffolding and replacement radome panels. They are in transit in New Zealand. Depending on the nature of the cargo it was shipped by an air freight or cargo vessel from Port Hueneme, CA where the NSF logistics hub in the US is located, to New Zealand. Any items that can’t be stored outside, such are electronics, are marked Do Not Freeze (DNF) and are temporarily stored in warm storage until they can be delivered and quickly unpacked.
Unpacking DNF crates with ground station electronics outside the JSOC
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HTSI/James Evans (left) and 567/Mike Mahon installing new equipment in the JSOC |
Hi Kevin,
check out map.pqube.com. It’s a project we are trowing together to show quality of electrical power and energy around the world. I’d love to have the McMurdo Station on this map!
Can we chat about it?
Fabio