By Peter Kimball

Our flight was cancelled again yesterday, so we took care of some more trainings and business around the hotel.  Everyone's fingers are crossed for our scheduled flight to McMurdo this evening.  John and Josh have been moved onto a different flight for logistical reasons, so we're also hoping that we all meet up with all our bags as soon as possible in McMurdo.

By Peter Kimball

There are many great things about Christchurch.  The Chrome Gnome is certainly one.

By Peter Kimball

As we feared, we woke up yesterday to the news that we wouldn't be flying to McMurdo and we wouldn't be given any training that day.  So, we rented two cars and checked out the local area.  One group went to Akaroa, a French town by the ocean on the peninsula south of Christchurch.  They walked the town and went out on a small ship to see penguins & dolphins.  Very cool.  

Meanwhile, I went with Bill, John, and Chris up into the mountains.  We had excellent weather and great light to experience the awesome landscapes in and around Arthur's Pass National Park.  We went for four short hikes, and the group was very tolerant of my "photographer's pace".

Chris was a hero, volunteering to drive our group on this trip.  Christchurch is super-high difficulty driving right now because of all the earthquake repair construction going on... plus Kiwis drive on the left.  The drive was exceedingly beautiful well before we even got to the park entrance.  Chris pulled over so I could get out and snap a few pictures:

We drove all the way to the summit of Arthur's Pass, and then got out to hike the most enticing spots on our way back down.  The first stop was a rocky road up to beautiful views of Avalanche Peak and a waterfall on our side of the valley.  We were amazed by the scenery and also by the clarity of the air that day.  Wow!

Our next stop on the way down was an even more majestic waterfall called The Devil's Punchbowl.

Just outside the national park, there's a beautiful limestone cave with a stream running through it.  Bill and John are way into caving, so this was a mandatory stop.  In a previous year, Bill went all the way through this cave, and there are plans brewing to repeat that trip if we're held in Christchurch too much longer...

Just downhill of Stream Cave lies Castle Station, named for the beautiful limestone formations that dot the area.  The late afternoon light made this an especially wonderful stop.

... so no Ice Flight, but a pretty excellent day nonetheless.

By Peter Kimball

On the way home from Arthur's Pass, we conducted a controlled head-to-head taste test, pitting Bundaberg Ginger Beer and Frank Ginger Beer against each other.  Bundaberg is the unanimous winner.

By Peter Kimball

5:30 am phone calls informed us that we would not be flying out today. Sad day. Instead, we went back to the CDC to knock off a few required trainings. There will be many more before we're allowed out on the sea ice, but we fought through the acronyms and made some good progress today. Above are some photos from today's survival bag familiarization.

By Peter Kimball

We made it to Christchurch, NZ!  We went to bed last night planning to fly to McMurdo today, but weather has kept us in Christchurch for the time being.  We did go to the USAP Clothing Distribution Center (CDC) to receive our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear (photos above).  While there, we also had our computers checked for anti-virus compliance and received anti-virus (flu) shots ourselves.  We checked into a new hotel and spent the rest of the day analyzing data from our last ARTEMIS lake test in TX.

The current plan is that we fly tomorrow, but the forecast indicates more bad weather ahead - if we can't fly tomorrow, we may be stuck here until Saturday.  Christchurch is nice, but we're keen to get to it!

By Peter Kimball

By Peter Kimball

We are deploying ARTEMIS beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, specifically in McMurdo Sound, just South of McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic Program research station that makes our field work possible.  ARTEMIS will follow 10 km paths under the ice shelf and back out to the launch and recovery drill hole.  We will only be able to use one drill hole (and associated base camp location) this season, so we hope to send ARTEMIS on a radial pattern of missions, as indicated in the graphic above, again taken from our Astrobiology Science Conference poster.

By Peter Kimball

Eight of us are headed to McMurdo Station (sans ARTEMIS) on August 26 (weather permitting) as part of 'Winfly' (Winter Flight), the first grouping of flights to go to McMurdo since winter began.  Our Winfly crew will work to select the best site to establish our base camp on the sea ice, and to set up as much of our gear as possible before ARTEMIS and the Mainbody crew arrive in October.

The amount of daylight we see will change drastically during our time at McMurdo.  When the Winfly crew arrives in late August, the length of day will be changing very quickly, but the sun will only actually be above the horizon from 10am to 4pm.  By the end of September, the sun will still set each day, but only briefly, and it will never be completely dark.  In late October, the sun will quickly dip below the horizon for the last time, leaving us in round-the-clock daylight for the rest of our time at McMurdo (we leave when the sea ice becomes unstable in early-mid December).  The figure linked below illustrates how lighting conditions vary at McMurdo throughout the year.

The temperatures we'll experience will vary quite a bit from August to December as well.  The figure linked below shows NIWA data for Scott Base (a Kiwi base next-door to McMurdo) plotted by the folks at metservice.com (check out their blog!).  Note that the mean daily Maximum temperature is -23.4C in August, and rises to -1.2C in December... but cold days can be very cold, and high winds can be extremely dangerous.  We fully expect to lose multiple working days to extreme weather conditions, especially early in our season.

By Peter Kimball

Enough renderings and vector drawings! This blog needs the genuine article! Here are some photographs of ARTEMIS taken at various stages of testing in 2015.  We'll go over the anatomy of ARTEMIS in a future post...

By Peter Kimball

ARTEMIS is a robot - a testbed for life-search technologies.  We're developing these technologies to search for life in the liquid oceans beneath the frozen crusts of icy moons in our solar system.  The ocean beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is an excellent icy moon analog environment where we can deploy ARTEMIS to test life-search technologies and learn some things about our home planet while we're at it.

ARTEMIS is designed and built by Stone Aerospace specifically to explore the environment beneath the Ross Ice Shelf.  She has a range of 20 km, carries an on-board water sample collection system plus a broad suite of scientific sensors, and features the ability to hover precisely, bringing scientific equipment into contact with the ice ceiling overhead.

It's one thing to cheerfully list off the designed capabilities of a robot.  It's quite another to actually build, deploy, and recover such a robot - especially in ice-covered antarctic waters.  This blog will follow the field team as we head to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, send ARTEMIS beneath the ice for the first time, and work towards bringing back valuable scientific data from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf.

By Peter Kimball

We will launch and recover ARTEMIS through a 4' (1.2 m) diameter drill hole in sea ice, just beyond the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.  She will then transit 10 km away from the drill hole, and 10 km back, collecting scientific data and stopping to take water samples along the way.  The cartoon above is taken from our Astrobiology Science Conference poster, and shows a nominal ARTEMIS mission.  The length of time required for each mission will depend on water currents, but we expect them to last about 10 hours, and we hope to pull off about 15 of them by the end of the year.

The ice overhead means that ARTEMIS cannot simply surface and await rescue in the event of a problem.  She must be able to return to the drill hole if anything goes wrong.  This mission design places great importance on ARTEMIS's navigation instruments and software (her ability to find her way back to the drill hole) and entails significant risk. However, this is exactly what an icy moon robot will have to do in order to get its data back to the surface for transmission to earth.  Here on Earth, the mission design allows ARTEMIS to maximize her time under the ice collecting valuable data.

Again, it's one thing to make a pretty picture of a nominal robotic field mission, but it's quite another to actually pull it off.  It'll be several weeks of environment characterization, in-water testing, and debugging before we're able to pull off a "nominal mission".