24OCT09

by Marco Flagg

 

After ‘smoking’ SCINI twice yesterday, we settled in for a nice, quiet day of concentrated engineering work back at the lab.  That’s how it goes in engineering.  While smoking a vehicle was on the surface a setback, we still learned a lot and turned that knowledge into productivity.  It had become plenty clear that SCINI is impossible to pilot efficiently without an attitude display.  And so, Jim sat down in the quiet library and came back with a working and calibrated IMU indicator.  The pilot can now monitor the vehicle pitch and roll precisely.  Francois worked on an improved version of the LED light ring, the flooding of which had caused yesterday’s failures.  Bob build a light ring driver electronics tester featuring nice colorful lights.  I spent the day testing and documenting the dual-sensor camera and annotation software, and that job was finished too.

 

So, by the end of the day, we had a number of significant new capabilities.  Meanwhile a few miles away at Cape Armitage, DJ, Francois and Stacy where fighting the ice. A large drill rig had failed.  And so, the crew was drilling a tiny 5″ starter hole down deep using a hand-held ‘Jiffy Drill’.  Adding flight after flight of drill bits, they finally broke through to sea water at 31′.  Overall, a day well spent!

 

 

 Bob is building a tester for the light ring driver board that we smoked twice the day before.

 

 

Jim is testing his IMU software.  It will help us fly SCINI straight and level.

 

 

I am testing the dual image sensor camera.

 

This big drill tried to srill through the ice at Cape Armitage, but the ice was too deep.

 

So, Stacy, DJ and Francois set out to drill a hole by hand.

 

 

It worked, but it took a really long drill bit.

 

Meanwhile, navigation transducer holes were surveyed by the McMurdo survey crew.

 

 

And the new ‘Southstar’ underwater navigaton system moved into its test phase.