Monday, December 21, 2009

Recovery of CASE stations complete

This morning we went into the field with the Flexmobile again to recover the last of the three prototype CASE-IPY stations (CAS02). The team from the last expedition was augmented by two extra volunteers, so we could dig faster. We also took along a chainsaw, which proved to be very useful in cutting the compacted snow up into blocks.

At this station, the acquisition system refused to talk to me at all, and seemed dead. I have not ascertained the cause of this yet, nor if the system had worked at any time since the last summer campaign. I should know in a few day's time...

A warmer day would have been nice (it was windy, and the wind-chill temperature was -50 degrees Celsius), but we worked well, and extracted nearly all the instrumentation (including the STS-2 seismometer) from the station OK. We could not recover the older of the two seismometer cables, though, so shall have to go back for it another time.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Alessia,

This reminds me that I still have a broken seismometer buried somewhere in the field (after something like 3 days of work following the cable).... But it doesn't disturbs anyone and as been replaced.

I hope you will have some very beautiful informations looking at the data and SOH. It looks quite exiting to recover the stations and the data after one year, not knowing what you wil find.

I wish you and JY somme good time for christmass and new year.

Jean-Marie.

PS : je croyasi que JY m'avais dit qu'il ne remettrait jamais les pieds là-bas ;)

Pierre-François said...

Alessia,
Sounds like you are having a great time over there! I truly hope you will manage to check your tasks list before coming back.
Must say the snow we have here makes me dream of some better place to be (than "Bruyères le Châtel")...
Have fun and take care.
Pierre-François