Intensity in Tent City

11/14/2015

By Peter Kimball

SIMPLE Camp in mid-season form. (photo: Peter Kimball)

Progress is happening at a terrific rate in SIMPLE camp. We've been working very long days advancing our science and engineering goals. Other than a few ours of planning discussions, we've taken today off, with most folks opting to sleep for many hours, as we had ARTEMIS in the water until 4 am last night.

The endless sunshine and super-long work hours are distorting our senses of time, but we remain ever conscious of the impending end of our field season. Happily, on our past few dives, we've achieved a number of exciting in-water milestones:

Spooled optical data fiber from the 15km spool on ARTEMIS, and up through a depressor hanging beneath the bot house.
Created a sonar map of the multi-year sea ice and ice shelf transitions near camp.
Demonstrated our most basic loss-of-communications autonomous recovery behavior.
Collected water samples under sea ice and returned them to the bot house.

Here are some photos from those dives:

Justin and Brian track ARTEMIS beneath the sea ice about 500 m from camp. (photo: Peter Kimball)

ARTEMIS is hauled up through the culvert on the docking bar. (photo: Peter Kimball)

1 Comment

Justin

1/11/2016 08:13:19 am

Knowing a little bit about long hours at SAS, I can only imagine ;)

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.