Wed, 9/7/2011 - AAL-PIP Dry Run for 2011-2012 Deployment

Today, the second day of AAL-PIP dry run at VTech, we moved all of the boxes of the AAL-PIP system to an indoor place, Virginia Tech Dairy Science Complex as it was expected to rain today. Joseph asked around to find a place where we could do dry run inside for the rainy day and luckily found this perfect place for the purpose. We tried to simulate the entire process from the tower setup to end-to-end test with Steve Musko at University of Michigan. We started at around 8am and were able to finish at around 4pm, which is earlier than we thought it would be.

Because of the roof material that could block Iridium communication, the electronics box was located near the building door and all the science instruments including Iridium antenna were set up outside. Steve Musko at University of Michigan confirmed us that communication via Iridium satellite went through.

Tues, 9/6/2011 - AAL-PIP Dry Run for 2011-2012 Deployment

This year, there will be a total of six members for AAL-PIP deployment in Antarctica. Bob McPherron from UCLA and Gary Bust from ASTRA visited VTech to join the other AAL-PIP deployment team members including Bob Clauer, Majid Manteghi, Kshitija Deshpande, Joseph Macon and me (Hyomin Kim) from VTech. The dry runs scheduled for today and tomorrow are intended to give Bob McPherron, Gary Bust, and Majid Manteghi, who will be the first time visitors in Antarctica, hands-on experience of the AAL_PIP system ("System 5"). It is raining pretty heavily today so we stayed inside the Satellite Tracking Building at VTech, in which our instruments are located, to go over our system and especially to try to assemble the battery box, which might be somewhat challenging for the first-timers. We also practiced cables which connect between the electronics box and the battery box.