All over but the shouting

We finished up this morning loading the sea crates. We sent absolutely everything back, including the trash from the instrument. There are no landfills in Antarctica anymore.

We started with what you saw in the earlier post in the plane and on the ice, brought it into the hangar (to the left), packed it more carefully, and then filled the crate. You can see the result below.

Recovery is hard on an instrument. The parts are fragile, and the handling is rough. The instrument was essentially undamaged at the landing site, even after getting dismantled (except for all the cut cables), but now I noticed several parts are worse for the trip in the plane and in the truck back to the hangar. Two TCD light guides are broken in their middles, and I noticed one TCD PMT was smashed. That all happened post-dismantling. My rule of thumb for recovery is (1) don't make it heavy, because if it is, people have to "gorilla" it to get it to get it where they want it in the plane or truck or hangar, (2) make special holders for recovery, like for the calorimeter, which worked out well - only a few IFO lines pulled off, and those were while trying to disentangle cable during recovery, which we gave up on and cut when we saw that we were doing more harm than good.

Now the crates have been turned over to the shipping gurus here, and magic happens, and somehow the crates end up back in the States. All these goods get handled again, as the stuff gets unloaded and distributed to the various institutions from which it came. And next year it all happens again.

Meanwhile, I have a few days of waiting before I catch a plane out of here. The room and board are a good price. There is moderate entertainment. I have a bit of regular work to do. So I won't get bored. We'll have a mild celebration of sorts. Yoann leaves on tomorrow's plane (he had such confidence in our finishing on time that he never changed his reservation from the 5th) while Terri and I are scheduled for the 11th, a week away. After that, I will tour NZ a bit, and get back to Cincinnati on March 1 or so.