We have spent the last few days preparing to put ARTEMIS in the water.  Technically, we've spent the last three years doing that, but things are really coming to a head now.  We've removed the flotation and coverings, and checked the fasteners, housings, connectors, and moving parts.  The McMurdo community has scrounged up a few replacement parts for us where needed.  Brian has been setting up his radio frequency tracking gear, and those of us on the software team have been setting up mission control and checking the data coming from the ARTEMIS sensors.

In the struggles department, many of us have been fighting nasty colds this week.  We're also having to work a bit to get everyone out to the site when they need to be there, and to keep from stepping on each other as we all work on various aspects of the robot.  We've been lucky enough to borrow some vehicles, some folks have pulled some very late nights to spread the schedule out, and Bill and John even slept at the camp on Wednesday night.  Soon, we'll have sleeping tents set up out there, giving us some more flexibility in scheduling and transportation.

On the whole, forward momentum is good right now, and the first in-water tests of ARTEMIS feel very close.

The stars aligned a few days ago such that all nine currently-in-the-field Stone Aerospace ARTEMIS team members were in the bot house with ARTEMIS at the same time.  I seized the moment to capture a group photo.

However, the group changes today.  A C-17, currently in the air, will deliver Mark and Keith to us, but will then take John back to the real world.

The weather has been cold, but nice and calm the last few days.  Mt. Erebus was looking excellent yesterday, sunlit even as low clouds shaded the sea ice near camp:

Justin made a really nice timelapse showing the delivery of ARTEMIS to the bot house.  Check out the youtube link above, or his original post on the SIMPLE blog.

Trips to the band room have continued to be the primary recreational activity for those of us in The McMurdo Sound.  We had such a fun time at the Carp Shop Party that we really wanted to play again before John heads back to West Virginia this Friday.  The forces of scheduling smiled upon us, and we were booked to play live at Gallagher's (one of two Bars on station) this past Saturday.  We headlined the night (ha!), with some super-talented musicians playing before us.

We came back to town on Saturday triumphant from moving ARTEMIS into the bot house in the afternoon.  That happiness, combined with tremendous excitement for the upcoming gig was quite a feeling.

We've expanded our repertoire since the Carp Shop Party.  We played the following set list on Saturday night:

1. Stray Cat Strut
2. Paint It Black
3. You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive
4. Comfortably Numb
5. House of the Rising Sun
6. Bacon Boy
7. Locomotive Breath
8. White Wedding
9. Knockin' on Heaven's Door
10. Wanted Dead or Alive
11. Whole Lotta Love
12. Tribute

Bacon Boy is an original song by Chris, which he performed solo.  It was a huge hit.  We had one of the Crary Lab Assistants, David, join us on stage to sing Whole Lotta Love - another crowd favorite.  The rest of the set uses the same lineup as we had at the Carp Shop Party, but with the excellent change of having John sing verses on Comfortably Numb.

We remain not very good at playing music, but we have improved quite a bit in the last few weeks.  We had huge energy on Saturday, the crowd was awesome, and we couldn't have enjoyed ourselves more.

Mischievous elements within McMurdo Station plotted to throw undergarments on stage during White Wedding, one of our best songs.  Peter's video from the back of the room captures the show rather well, including the flying undies.  Here are some frames:

After series of frustrating weather and logistics delays over the past few weeks, we moved ARTEMIS out to our field site yesterday.  October 24th is later than we hoped, but it's very exciting nevertheless.  This is a huge milestone in the project, and we feel very close to getting ARTEMIS beneath Antarctic ice for the first time.

The move on Saturday was a huge cooperative effort between USAP Fleet Ops folks and the SIMPLE team.  Getting ARTEMIS into the bot house was a tight fit requiring some elaborate choreography.  The call was made early in the day to hold off for a few hours to get better weather.  This paid off in a big way as we had some of the calmest winds we've seen over our whole deployment in the early afternoon.  It was a stressful operation, but we succeeded without incident, and returned to McMurdo in high spirits just before dinner.

Here are some views around our field camp in the beautiful weather we had for the move:

With recent arrivals of Luke Winslow and Peter Doran the SIMPLE field team now numbers 13 - a serious science force.  We were in full-swing yesterday with some of the team working on vehicle software on station, and some of us working parallel tasks at the field site.

Inside the bot house, we worked to clear ice from the ARTEMIs culvert.  That culvert was set weeks ago, and has frozen in during the weather-delayed construction of the bot house.

Meanwhile, we also supported fleet ops in dragging our fish hut off its drill hole, widening that hole, and installing a culvert there.

By lowering a fish cam through the ARTEMIS culvert (in the bot house), we were able to verify that the new fish hut culvert extends deep enough to clear the forming platelets beneath our field camp.

The polar transition from 24-hour darkness to 24-hour daylight is a very gradual one.  We haven't seen stars at night for several weeks now.  And while today doesn't look perceptibly different from yesterday, we are now technically entering a summer of continuous direct sunlight.  Of course, we may lose the sun behind Mt. Discovery for another night or two, and we'll have a few more nights with pastel colors at midnight, but it's now daytime all the time here at McMurdo.

We were at our fish hut until 4am last night doing Sunfish tests.  I got a chance to step outside and take a few photos of the last sunset I'll see until I return to the U.S. next month.

With favorable tidal conditions occurring between 8pm and 2am last night, the programmers headed to the fish hut for a late-night test of the ARTEMIS docking bar.  We tested a few vehicle software features, but the highlight of the night was the first-ever deployment of the flashing ARTEMIS docking bar beneath the ice. We wanted to know how far away a robot could be from the bar for it to still be visible, as well as how far away the computer vision dock detector algorithm could identify it. We started Sunfish looking at the bar, and backed away while monitoring the video image. The water is extremely clear in McMurdo sound at this time of year.  We reached a range of about 150 m, and were still able to see the bar(!). The computer vision algorithm was able to get intermittent hits even at this range, and was reliable up close (within 20m). The computer vision system only needs to function within about 5m, and the cameras have much better low light capabilities on ARTEMIS than Sunfish, so we called it a success and moved on to other tests.

We got some trippy sci-fi-esque video of the docking bar being deployed down the borehole, as well as Sunfish being recovered through heavy platelet ice. Check it out below!

Sunfish is recovered through the borehole with heavy (but beautiful) platelet ice accumulation.

I gave the Sunday Science Lecture yesterday.  Riding a wave of enthusiasm from Vickie's talk last week, I talked about the ARTEMIS vehicle and how it fits into the SIMPLE astrobiology science mission.  Bill provided nice solid model renderings to illustrate some of the vehicle concepts.  Evan and I demoed the actual lighted docking bar during the talk.  I really enjoyed giving the talk, and I was pleased by the enthusiastic audience participation when I asked questions like "who believes there is or was at some time life elsewhere in the universe?"

We will be doing another show-and-tell with ARTEMIS after dinner tonight.

Evan and I were in the Crary lab today assembling the LED-illuminated docking bars that ARTEMIS uses to dock with its recovery gear.  The spacing and flashing frequency of the LEDs is known by the ARTEMIS software, so it can easily find the bar and compute the distance between itself and the bar.  Since the bar serves a critical purpose in the docking process, we will have a spare ready to substitute if necessary.

We scoffed when we learned that our office in the Crary lab building was designated for six people.  "Four people is about the max.  Six would be crazy," we said.  Then yesterday, it came to pass that we ended up with seven people in the office discussing the merits of various data postprocessing pipeline architectures just before dinner.  No problem.

Once ARTEMIS science operations begin, we will need to send personnel over the surface with tracking equipment to obtain GPS measurements of the robot's position.  Britney, Justin, Josh, and I headed out on snowmobiles with Alasdair (a USAP sea ice safety expert) to scout the area of the ice shelf where surface travel will be the most difficult.  We rode approximately due West from our field site.

What we learned was encouraging.  The shelf ice was very smooth for nearly 8 km.  After a very sudden transition, the ice beyond that point is very rough with wind ablation features.  Those features are dense enough, and high enough that snowmobile travel will be very slow, and Pisten Bully travel will be impossible beyond that transition.  the encouraging bit is that the first 8 km are so smooth - smooth enough to travel in a Pisten Bully.  The range of ARTEMIS is 10 km, so we'll have fairly easy surface tracking, even to the worst-case West for most of the vehicle range.

The wind was out of the East, so when we turned around to travel back to the site, we were heading straight upwind, and our comfort level plummeted.  Tuesday was very cold.  Wind speeds were high and forecasted to continue increasing.  We would have liked to scout along more directions from camp, but we made the call that the cold and wind made it too dangerous for us to stay out.  I also would have liked to take more photos out there, but the thermal cost of going down to only two glove layers for photography was quite high, so I only took a few.

We'll do more scouting on a warmer, calmer day, but learning what we learned Tuesday has taken some pressure off and made us feel fairly confident about our surface operations.

by Kristof Richmond

Yesterday, Vickie, Josh, and I went out to our field site to help out getting the tarp on the bot house skeleton that has been waiting for weeks to be covered. 

The weather was clear and calm, if cold, and we had some excellent views of the surroundings.

As if to put and exclamation point on our excellent day, the C-17 came in for a landing just as we finished guying out the completed tent.

Today, interior work continued, and heaters and electrical outlets were installed. Josh, Justin, Peter, and I headed out to unpack components of the Launch And Recovery System (LARS)—a rolling frame with winches that will lift ARTEMIS and rotate it vertically to fit down the bore hole, and reverse the operation to bring it back out.

Construction of the ARTEMIS bot house continues to be stalled by weather.  It's frustrating, but the silver lining has been a series of opportunities to share ARTEMIS with the McMurdo Station population before it's moved out of town to our field site.  We've had show-and-tell events yesterday and today.  Both events were attended well beyond our expectations by administrators, galley staff, shuttle drivers, equipment techs, other science groups... you name it!  We were really happy to meet so many different folks from around the station and to share ARTEMIS with them before it disappears to our field camp.  We encouraged our visitors to climb up on the ARTEMIS crate, touch the robot, take pictures, and ask questions.  I wedged myself into the space in front of the vehicle nose and had a fantastic time with visitors for over two hours.  Britney, Kristof, Luke, Evan, and Bill were all around the room doing the same.

In related news, Vickie kicked off the season's series of Sunday Science Lectures yesterday.  Her talk, Ice and Rocks and Robots, oh My! The Yellow-Brick Road to Europa, was very well attended and very well received.  There's no auditorium on station, so these sorts of things happen in the dining hall.  Our group will be giving two more talks this season - one about the SIMPLE science mission, and one about the ARTEMIS robot specifically.

 By Kristof Richmond

This morning, John, Josh, and I went out to the field site to help the carps (construction folk for those of you who haven't been following along) finish setting up the bot house.  The weather has been poor again for the last few days, preventing any progress on construction at the field site, but it seemed there was a clearing this morning as we toodled out in the Pisten Bully. 

But Antarctica decided to be Antarctica, and about 1/2 mile before we got to the field site, we ran into a band of wind and blowing snow that engulfed the Pisten Bully and the site. The carps we there, valiantly shoveling snow and organizing materials, but there was no was we'd be able to pull the tarps forming the bot house shell over the skeleton in this weather. We all decided to wait it out, as there was some hope of the weather lifting. 

We waited for almost two hours, but the wind was just getting stronger and stronger, so we called it a day and headed back to town.

Almost as if to mock us, there was still a transition from windy to calm at almost the exact same spot on the road as on the way out, and the flags on the poles marking the way were limp or lightly flapping most of the way back. Ah, life in the Antarctic.

We opened up the ARTEMIS crate today and and performed a visual inspection of the robot.  All in all, ARTEMIS seems to have traveled very well (thanks to all the cargo folks here and in the US!).  We learned about a few issues that we'll need to address before ARTEMIS goes in the water, and we also got a feel for what things we might be able to access for testing while ARTEMIS is in its temporary home in the SPOT shop.  Speaking of SPOT, we owe that team enormous thanks for letting us store and access ARTEMIS in their shop until the bot house is completed at our field site - they have been very gracious to us.

As the station population grows, some of the over-winterers and winfly folks grumble about crowding in the cafeteria and new demands on time and resources.  However, there was also great joy yesterday when the most recent flights' fresh veggies hit the serving line.  

The number and variety of recreational opportunities are also growing with the station population.  I've been enjoying pickup volleyball and soccer in the "large gym" on a few evenings the past two weeks.  Here are a few random timer shots I took at volleyball this week:

We all headed out onto the sea ice yesterday morning.  Chris, Josh, Justin and I took Sunfish out to the fish hut while the others got in some work with our snowmobiles (now available to us as nicer weather and more vehicle maintenance support are available).  Britney, Chris, Justin, and I stayed out at the fish hut and dove Sunfish to test out some new software that Chris and I have been working on.

The dive was very productive from a software standpoint, but we were very excited to be greeted by some new visitors to our drill hole:  Pagothenia borchgrevinki.  Some of our biologist friends here told us about these fish when we first saw them in large numbers beneath the shelf edge.  It was very cool to see these ghostly fish up close in our drill hole.

Some more fun pictures from the day include a status update on the bot house construction (ongoing next to our fish hut) and some shots of Chris and me operating Sunfish in the fish hut

Yesterday was a big day for our project.  The C-17 was able to make it through from Christchurch, bringing ARTEMIS as well as three more of our team.  Justin, Britney, and I met Evan, Kristof, and Brian at the Pegasus White Ice Runway.  We also stuck around to watch the ARTEMIS crate be unloaded (very exciting!), and the C-17 load up and take off back to New Zealand (very cool!).

The folks on station have been very good to our project.  The cargo crews have been handling ARTEMIS with great care, and the South Pole Overland Traverse team have cleared a space in their shop where ARTEMIS is currently nice and warm while we work through weather delays affecting our bot house construction.

OK, since my colleagues are slacking on the job and neglecting to post updates, I'm just going to have to jump in here. Who's this crazy guy, you may ask? Read my blurb over there ➘
​
Evan, Brian, and I arrived safe and sound in Christchurch last Wednesday. The next day, we got our Extreme Weather Clothing issue and saw the C-17 ready to take us to McMurdo along with ARTEMIS herself.

Alas, much has changed since I was here seven years ago.

But it's inspiring to see how Christchurch has picked itself up, dusted itself off, and marches on, embracing the changes with it's eyes on a brighter future.

By Evan Clark​

Our friends at OpenROV have kindly lent us two OpenROVs for use during our expedition. What is an OpenROV you ask? OpenROV is an open-source, affordable, remotely operated underwater robot aimed at making underwater exploration accessible to everyone, as well as a vibrant DIY community dedicated to the collaborative development of this platform and inspiring people with all backgrounds to get their feet wet and explore.

OpenROV's mission is to bring the magic of underwater discovery to everyone, not only research or industry groups with access to expensive ROVs or AUVs, and to encourage citizen science and democratize underwater exploration. With two cutting edge AUVs at our disposal and the logistical backing of the United States Antarctic Program, we obviously have a little more underwater exploration firepower than the average OpenROVer, but that does not mean the OpenROVs will not be extremely useful to us. We plan to use them as low-cost "expendable" observation platforms to scout out situations where we are not yet ready to risk sending in a diver or SUNFISH. For example, if ARTEMIS gets stuck under the ice and we are having difficulty recovering her, we can send an OpenROV to perform initial reconnaissance of the situation. We also hope to use the OpenROVs to provide better situational awareness of critical operations near the borehole, as well as capture sweet footage of the other robots working under ice.

All systems nominal! Thanks, OpenROV, for these contributions to our robot fleet. We hope to put them to good use in Antarctica!

Last Saturday, we played our first ever live gig at the end-of-winfly Carp Shop Party.  John came up with our band name:  The McMurdo Sound.  Geographically, the McMurdo Sound is the region of water separating Ross Island from the Antarctic continent to the west.  For a station rock band, the double meaning is fantastic, and were thrilled to confirm with a veteran music legend here that the name has never been used before.

Left-to-right in the photos above, the McMurdo Sound consists of:  John - Bass Guitar; Bill - Lead Guitar; Justin - Drums; Peter - Rhythm Guitar & Lead Vocals - Chris:  Keyboard & Vocals.

Our set list for the Carp Shop Party was:

1. Stray Cat Strut
2. You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive
3. White Wedding
4. Comfortably Numb
5. House of the Rising Sun*
6. Tribute

*John and I completely switch roles for House of the Rising Sun, and John sounds excellent on the vocals.

History is determined by those who write it, so I'll report here that we were totally awesome and that the crowd loved us at the Carp Shop Party.  We definitely had an amazing time, and we're grateful to the Carpenters for letting us play along with some really impressive bands at the party.

Yesterday was a great day out at the fish hut, but it did not begin exactly as we'd planned.  I headed out with Britney, Chris, and Justin to deploy Sunfish.  We arrived at the hut to find it filled with snow.  One of our fish hut doors doesn't close quite right, and the weather reached Condition 1 the night before.  It only took a few minutes to shovel the snow out of the hut.

The real pandemonium began just after we deployed Sunfish.  As Sunfish descended through the hole, Justin and Britney said "wow, that's a lot of platelet ice!"  Sunfish had destabilized a large volume of platelet ice around the bottom of the hole that then floated up into the drill hole.  We put Sunfish in station-keeping mode and worked to remove platelet ice from the hole for about half an hour.   Bucket after bucket and net after net, we added to the massive "platelet glacier" outside one of the hut doors until the ice pack was loose enough to run the tether freely.  Only then could we actually begin our mission.  Even more ice had to be removed before we could recover the vehicle later.

This was the first time we'd run the vehicle since taking out its Doppler sonar for current profiling almost two weeks ago.  In that time, Chris made some improvements to the vehicle navigation software and pilot interface, we surveyed the alignment of the fish hut, and we used the Doppler current profiler and tide model to plan operation times with low current velocity.  All these things came together yesterday to yield our best Sunfish mission yet.

Our timing with respect to the water current was excellent - we experienced only minimal control disturbances, even with a record 250 m of optical fiber and high-strength line paid out in the water behind the vehicle.  We traveled 200 m from the drill hole, and got under the Ross Ice Shelf for the first time.  There, we observed a 20 - 30 degree slope in the ice ceiling overhead, down to a water depth of about 13 m.  We also found a high concentration of ~25 cm fish under the sea ice just outside the shelf.  Finally, at the end of the mission, the improved navigation software put us directly beneath the drill hole for an efficient recovery.

Here's an excerpt of the live feed (with Chris's updated pilot information overlay) from Sunfish, taken just short of the shelf edge, where the fish density was highest:

And, for our friends in the field with limited bandwidth, here's a screenshot:

The only bad news from the day was that my GoPro (attached to Sunfish) stopped recording about 7 minutes into the dive, and somewhat more seriously, that the platelet ice accumulation beneath our field camp has stacked up to about 6.8 m water depth, enough to completely "bury" the ARTEMIS culvert we installed with the drillers and carpenters a little over a week ago.

By the end of the day, the weather was beautiful and Mt. Erebus was looking spectacular.  We heard on the radio that the C-17 was approaching just as we were packing up to head back into town.  With each incoming flight, the station population swells.  Over winter, the population is around 150.  During Winfly (when we arrived), the population is around ~200 - 300.  Population peaks at ~1200 - 1300 at the beginning of the summer season.  Many groups then depart to field camps and to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, leaving the McMurdo population to stabilize at about 800 for the majority of summer.

The next two flights will bring fresh vegetables, ARTEMIS, and three more of our field team members!