| January 23, 2001 -- The ATIC
Antarctic expedition is winding down. Yesterday a Twin Otter with a
crew of 4 (pilot, co-pilot, Steven Peterzen and Mark Wefel) flew to the
ATIC landing site on the Antarctic plateau to begin the disassembly and
recovery of the ATIC experiment. The crew found the payload is fairly
good shape, standing upright and only minimal damage to the ATIC solar
arrays and external frame. However, after removing the bottom
hemisphere of the pressure vessel they found that 3 out of 4 electronics
bay had broken support structures. Presumably this damage occurred
during parachute deployment when the experiment is subject to the
largest stress (10 g's) of the flight. Even with this damage the
computer and electronic boards in these bays appear to be intact. The
recovery crew removed high priority items from the experiment for
transport back to Williams Field. These items included the flight data
storage hard disk, the BGO calorimeter detector, the electronics bays
and the ATIC solar array panels. The data on the storage hard disk was
examined today and appears to be intact. An additional Twin Otter flight
later this week will be required to recover the remaining detectors and
equipment.
In the mean time, the ATIC crew is in the process of packing the
support equipment, spared, tools, electronic test equipment and computer
system back into the shipment crates. Most of these crates will
return to the US via ocean vessel and will not arrive at LSU until
mid-April. Finally, as our work here is completed the remaining
ATIC crew members will return to the US by early next week. As a
result this will be the final Antarctica update to this web site.
It has been an interesting adventure and we intend to return for an ATIC
reflight in 2002. |
|
A Twin Otter airplane is used in the
recovery of the ATIC experiment
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Flight Systems run on QNX Realtime OS.