West Lake Bonney, Taylor Valley, Antarctica
Reporting from Blood Falls Basecamp
Today we had a couple of changes in crew. We got a new helper, Leah, from the Berg Field Center in McMurdo to keep us sane, and Peter and Bart left in the afternoon for McMurdo. Since Bart had been the only person designing mission plans for the bot each day, he took some time in the morning to show Bill and Vickie how to design a mission plan and then check whether the mission length and number of sonde drop points planned was within the bounds of our battery power. After the coordinates for the mission plan were extracted from the planning map and Shilpa programmed them into the bot, we were ready to get in the water.
Our smiling assistant Leah from the BFC has come to help us stay sane. Good luck!
Shilpa and Vickie plan the upcoming mission. Mission planning is the balancing act of connecting the dots to hit as many points as possible without running out of battery power.
Today’s sonde mission took us to the southwest edge of the lake. We were able to get the bot much closer to the shore than we had predicted. We hit 9 points today, including the points we had to skip from yesterday’s truncated mission. We continue to rack up data.
Our status at the end of Mission 3.
Reporting by Vickie Siegel