ARTEMIS

Another Sunfish Dive From The Fish Hut

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

Bot house construction progress has been halted for a few days due to high winds on the sea ice. The next step will be to put the fabric insulation and coverings on. (photo: Peter Kimball)

Reporting by Peter Kimball

ARTEMIS and Team Arrive

Britney greets Evan, Kristof, and Brian – fresh off the C-17 at the Pegasus White Ice Runway. (photo: Peter Kimball)

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.

Reporting by Peter Kimball

More Christchurch Waiting

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 ➘
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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.

Kristof in front of the C-17 loaded with ARTEMIS, waiting for the weather to clear. (photo: Evan Clark)

We were supposed to fly out on Friday. Even though the first Mainbody flights earlier in the week had gotten through without much delay, at 4:45 am on Friday we got the call that our flight had been delayed 24 hours due to weather in McMurdo. And the same call every day since. If we get delayed again tomorrow, we’ll have beaten Peter & Company’s delay count—and that was much deeper in the winter. Naturally, every day of delay here means that weather at McMurdo is preventing progress on the installation of our field camp and bothouse.
But that is the nature of work in Antarctica. We’re filling the time usefully. Evan and I are working on robot code here (though we can’t test it), Brian has worked out the antenna geometries he wants to try for our radio communications system (thought he can’t build it), and in McMurdo Peter and Chris are making code improvements and analyzing data from SUNFISH, and everyone else is preparing to hit the ground running once the four of us get there.

Of course, while here, we also can’t miss taking in the sights of picturesque—if somewhat rubble-filled—Christchurch.

Ah! the banks of Christchurch’s River Avon in spring. (photo: Kristof Richmond)

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.

A new shopping district south of the city center put together out of shipping containers—very useful in a pinch. (photo: Kristof Richmond)

Reporting by Kristof Richmond

Thanks OpenROV!

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.

OpenROVs are built by researchers, students, schools, and backyard tinkerers to uncover the mysteries of our watery world (photo: OpenROV).

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.

OpenROV and ARTEMIS pose together at Stone Aerospace HQ. (photo: Evan Clark)

Bill rocks a red OpenROV beanie. (photo: Evan Clark)

Before leaving for Antarctica, I had a chance to take one of the OpenROVs for a quick dive / systems checkout at a local pond.

Reporting by Evan Clark

Under The Shelf

A snow drift greets us inside the fish hut as we arrive. (photo: Peter Kimball)

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:

Pilot’s view screenshot as Sunfish approaches the edge of the McMurdo Ice Shelf, near the SIMPLE field site.

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!

Mt. Erebus looks excellent in the evening light. (photo: Peter Kimball)

The C-17 passes close to our field site on landing approach. (photo: Peter Kimball)

Reporting by Peter Kimball