It has been a quiet day for the campaign team. There were no wildlife sightings. Cloudy conditions increased. Temperatures in Eureka were -41°C, while temperatures at the PEARL Ridge Lab were -34°C.
In the PEARL Ridge Lab's IR lab, solar measurements were not possible with the Bruker or PARIS due to significantly cloudy weather. Dan spent part of his morning writing up how to create macros to run Bruker measurements. This will benefit one of our NDACC/TCCON partners (Dan Smale) who is setting up an instrument in Arrival Heights, Antarctica. In the afternoon, Dan read into past efforts to perform lunar FTIR measurements in Antarctica and Ny ≈lesund. He also worked on campaign website tasks, organized the space around the Bruker computer, and started revising the Bruker SOP document.
Sebastien investigated why the PARIS GPS has had trouble locking onto a signal.
Xiaoyi is pleased that SAOZ, UT-GBS, and PEARL-GBS all continue to operate nominally. The tenacious patch of frost on PEARL-GBS's dome is slightly smaller today. Last night, Xiaoyi took direct-moon measurements (using passive tracking) using PEARL-GBS. He is still working on similarly acquiring direct-moon measurements with UT-GBS, whose code appears to be missing some OpenCV modules.
Paul cleared the SPS window of light frost today and noticed that the SPS tracker was not properly reading the command file. He reset it. This may have been happening for the last couple of days unnoticed. Zahra then helped Paul confirm SPS is now properly operating again.
Problems with the liquid nitrogen generator continue. Yesterday, Mike and Paul tried to get it turned on again but they could not get proper pressure throughout the system. Today they connected a smaller air compressor to the system; however, it was too small. After attempting to run it for six hours, no liquid nitrogen was produced. There is another compressor at the Ridge Lab that is bigger that they will try. They will test it to find out if it is capable of supplying the required pressure for the system to work. Paul and Mike will also ask the Eureka Weather Station's mechanic if he can provide insight on the original pump in case they have missed something. There's a small chance they can change compressor heads with the second of the bigger air compressor.
The team still has some liquid nitrogen in reserve, but it is unlikely to last to the end of the Intensive Phase of the campaign without the generator replenshing the supply. Dan and Sebastien will do their utmost to conserve and ration its use in case the generator cannot be brought back online in short order.
After dinner, the campaign team ventured outside the Eureka Weather Station to watch today's ACE ozonesonde launch, which occurred at 6:15 pm (local time). The balloon reached its maximum altitude of 27,563 m (12.1 hPa) two hours later.
Tonight, Dan again attempted lunar measurements with the Bruker and Jonathan's experimental tracker code. Unfortunately, clouds prevented any further tests.