Checking Out Our Candidate Field Site

9/18/2015

By Peter Kimball

We had a great day today deploying Sunfish at our candidate field site. It was not a bright sunny day, but there was enough light coming through the ice for us to learn quite a bit from the imagery. The platelet ice accumulation is certainly significant, but so far, we haven't seen anything too scary from a robot operations perspective. Here are some stills from a GoPro I attached to Sunfish for today's dive.

We ran the vehicle battery all the way down exploring the area around our fish hut. We were just about to start some other experiments at the surface when the weather changed dramatically. We had been commenting all day about how nice and not-too-cold it was outside. Then, over the course of about 15 minutes, the wind came up to 60 mph, and visibility dropped to less than two car lengths. We packed up our gear and drove back to station in close formation, navigating our route over the sea ice by GPS.

I drive our Pisten Bully back to McMurdo in nasty conditions. (photo: Justin Lawrence)

The other half of our team is in a Mattracks truck, barely visible ahead of us. (photo: Justin Lawrence)

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About the Blog

This is the personal blog of Peter Kimball and Evan Clark, following our deployment with the ARTEMIS long-range underwater robotic vehicle to explore beneath the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Authors

Peter Kimball is an aerospace engineer and field roboticist on the Stone Aerospace ARTEMIS project.

Evan Clark is a computer scientist and field roboticist on the Stone Aerospace ARTEMIS project.

Kristof Richmond is a mechanical engineer and field roboticist on the Stone Aerospace ARTEMIS project.