First of all, I apologize for posting this two days late. We have been really busy and only now do I get a chance to write about thursday. Thursday was a really exciting day as we flew SCINI with a clump weight for the first time. We left the lab as soon as we could and drove to the deep Cap Armitage site.

Bob, Scott and DJ loading all the gear necessary for deploying SCINI.

First, we had redrill the holes because they had frozen over during the night. I think drilling holes in the ice is Bob’s favorite part of the entire mission, you should see him handling the drill, it’s a very funny sight. During the entire process, he yells instructions, advices, orders or jokes to his helper, in that case, Scott.

Once this was done, we hooked up the SCINI system: baseline stations in the holes, generator, 3 laptop computers and large monitor, tether spool, clump weight and float and finally SCINI itself. We also measured the exact coordinates of the three navigation holes.

We operate SCINI out of the Pit Bull which is quite comfortable, 4 people (engineer, pilot, navigator and scientist) fit in the blacked out cabin.

Bob deploying SCINI through the 10 inch hole.

Bob is handling the tether (yellow line) while the scientist, the pilot, the navigator and the engineer are inside the Pit Bull controlling SCINI (notice the blacked out windows). The black lines on the snow are the cables of the sonar system, going out to the the baseline stations. The grey box on the left is the tether spool.

We lowered the clump weight to about 600ft (see Stacy’s post for explanation about the clump weight). First, DJ tried to fly SCINI down, but it soon became obvious that letting the clump weight drag SCINI down was easier. SCINI soon reached the seafloor, and there it was flying at up to 705 ft: the southernmost, deepest Antarctic ROV dive ever! The clump really made a huge difference, DJ was able to fly SCINI for several hours, without major problems.

Scott and I had to leave early to go to a GPS training in the afternoon. This training, which I expected to last about an hour ended up taking the entire afternoon! Joe, a GPS specialist taught us how to use equipment which can measure coordinates very accurately. If the conditions are right and the equipment is used properly, this equipment can measure a position with a millimeter accuracy! We use it to know the position of the baseline station, which in turn are used to measure SCINI’s position underwater.

Scott and our GPS instructor Joe.