Day off

After our long day yesterday, we decided to take the day off today. We saw a movie on the projector in our jamesway last night and went to bed around 3:00 a.m. I woke around 2:00 p.m. today to a warm day (temperature right now is only -7 Celsius), had breakfast, and walked around bit. Then I chilled out with some music and a book. At night, I cooked one of my favorite dishes for dinner and Vickie made brownies. It’s been a relaxing day and was badly needed!

I wandered around for a bit to enjoy the warm day. Lake Bonney camp. We drive up the valley on the lake ice to the Bot-house.

Out tents. My tent is to the far right.

Chris chilling out with a book on the "couch" in the jamesway.

Vickie making brownies.

First successful profiling mission

We just finished our first successful profiling mission today. We performed profiling at 19 points. The approximate length of the mission was 2.4 km. The mission was mostly uneventful. We saw some interesting microbial growth on lake bottom near the shore and also some iron leached out from sediments. John extracted some data from yesterday’s profile which shows some very interesting characteristics (I will post some of John’s plots and a map soon). We also ran down the batteries and now have a better characterization of the tripping behavior – this should help us plan future missions better. It’s been a very long day. We have worked non-stop for 14 hours. I am exhausted but elated. Below are some pictures.

Chris setting up the charge cables for the bot.

Mission control - Kristof, Shilpa and Chris.

Biological matter at lake bottom in the shallow area near shore. This photo was taken by the camera of our main science package "profiler". The profiler spools down all the way to lake bottom and measure various chemical properties of lake water.

Rust colored streaks at lake bottom. These are probably formed by iron leaching from the sediment. Almost looks like the surface of an alien planet.

Another picture of lake bottom. We don't know what we are seeing here.

Beautiful Sunday

We woke up today to find that it had snowed at night. It doesn’t snow very much here, so I was happy to witness such a day.  We had decided to work only half a day.  I woke up to  a breakfast of nice coffee (thanks John),  eggs (thanks Leal) and pancakes (thanks Bill and Kristof). We went to work at around 2:00 p.m. We were able to figure out the cause of most of our problems. We have new batteries on the robot this year and the batteries had reset themselves. In the process of debugging, we had a created a large file that filled up the hard-drive and prevented processes from running. The exact cause of battery reset is not known yet, but most likely the readings that show the amount of power left that we were relying on were not right, and the batteries had less power than we thought they did. We have some experiments planned for tomorrow to gather more data to help us understand the problem further.

Myself enjoying the beautiful morning.

Rachel

Kristof

View from ATV on ride back to camp from the Bot-house.

Another view during the ATV ride.