Into the Dark

 T minus 3 weeks until I leave for the frozen north. Today in Fairbanks, the high is -15°F and the low is -25. Things change rapidly, but that's how I expect it will be most of the time while I'm there. Hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. (If there's a hitch, it's a big hitch, i.e. Omicron.) To boost those chances, the team has an official song and dance to "summon the aurora" and ensure mission success. It's no banana, but it could help. 

A little rumination about the dark. 

I don't think I talked about this back during my Norway travels, but if you don't see the Sun for a couple weeks, it changes you. In 2010, I traveled to Svalbard (an archipelago far north of mainland Norway) for the RENU rocket launch and didn't see the Sun for two and a half weeks. Up there, in the winter, there is no dawn, no peeking over the horizon, just darkness. The sky gets a tiny bit lighter during the middle of the "day" - say the difference between nightfall and full-on night (slight distinction). It was weird and psychologically rough. When I flew off-island on the way home and landed in Tromsø (the Paris of the north!) and saw the Sun rise for the first time in 18 days, I had a near-religious experience. It made me want to compose an epic poem to a Sun God. Or fall on my knees and wail. Instead I think I quietly cried while staring at the Sun long enough that the words "retinal damage" surfaced in my mind. At a time like that, you really get the obsession of ancient cultures with the Sun, the deification, all of it. The Sun is life. 

On the other side of that - sunlight 24 hours a day, which I experienced in the Antarctic summer - it's not such a big deal. You pull the blackout curtains at night, lower the lights, and hang out like you would in the evenings at home. If you venture outside in the middle of the night into the blinding light, it's a bit of a shock, but doesn't mess with your mental state in the same way as no sun. There's not the visceral attachment to the night, as with the daylight. 

Which seemed odd to me, since I've always preferred the night to the day. Given a choice, I'll take the darkness of night over the daylight almost anytime. In high school and through college, all I wanted was to stay up all night and sleep all day. Funny that it's still the sunlight that is most necessary. Something baked into our reptile brains, for sure. 

So. Into the dark once more. This time of year, Fairbanks gets quite a bit of sunlight, I just won't be awake for most of it. Our launch window is midnight to 4am local time, so I'll be sleeping 7am to 3pm-ish. I will be able to catch some late afternoon daylight though, so not the same thing. And I like to think my mental state is healthier than when I was in grad school. We'll see!

Pre-Covid Ground Support Trip

 In December 2019/January 2020, a contingent of the LAMP ground support team and our PI, Sarah Jones, traveled to Fairbanks, AK to deploy and test some ground-based equipment. (Yes, Covid was already coursing through the population, but we had no idea at the time. Later that month, I did a back-to-back trip to Norway as a lecturer for a sounding rocket school and to Bern for an ISSI meeting. Blissfully unaware of the dark days to come.) 

We had several goals for the trip: reconnaissance of the domes at the Poker Flat science building (size, structures for cameras, etc.), testing of a riometer system brought from NJIT (simple explanation is it measures ionospheric density), testing of the USAFA's high-framerate imager in the domes, testing of Japanese imagers, running through the optical and other ground-based measurements we'll have for the launch, and just practicing observing pulsating aurora events. 

Most of the trip consisted of activities like science discussions in the science center's kitchen: 

Real science getting done

and troubleshooting the equipment we brought:

Don and Geoff deliberating

While it might not look like much, it was an incredibly beneficial trip. It helped us cement our launch observing plan, and start to refine launch criteria. We had representatives from the Japanese team able to meet in person with Iowa, Goddard, USAFA and NJIT folks. I feel like we got more done in a week than the months of previous telecons. And of course, not to be underestimated: serious team bonding! 

The group was there over the New Year holiday, so we all trekked out to the University to drink hot cider in the freezing cold and watch fireworks at midnight. Here we are warming up in the museum (https://www.uaf.edu/museum/) just prior to the light show.

This museum is also where I found the dopiest taxidermied bear I've ever seen, almost (but not quite) rivaling Anthony's famous tiger for goofiness. 

Can't get enough Super Golden Crisp

Mostly at my insistence about how much fun we'll have! and how much exercise in the fresh air we'll get!, Hyomin, Geoff, and I rented cross-country skis for the week and went skiing every day before work. Since we worked nights, that meant getting up around 1pm, hustling to ski for a couple hours before the meager daylight faded completely, going out for "lunch" around 6 or 7pm then driving up to the rocket range to work until 3, 4, or 5am. Fairbanks has a community nordic center with lots of different runs including nice hills - man, was the skiing fantastic.  

The place is so big we have to consult the map!

Yeah. Team building. I would also argue that exercising in some way is fundamental to any good scientific research trip, and in the cold, arctic weather this was a pretty good option. (It was literally negative degrees F some days though. Legitimately cold.)

In the early morning hours, when transitioning temporarily to the night shift against your normal internal clock, things can get a bit silly. Some of the Japanese contingent decided to try some extreme-cold-weather experiments one night, like throwing the hot cup of water into the air to watch it turn into a cloud instantaneously. Or (for some reason) leaving a banana outside to freeze and trying to hammer a nail into wood with it. Not sure why that would work. And it didn't. But the banana did hilariously cleave neatly in two during the attempt. Asamura-san decided this was "the lucky banana" for the LAMP mission and asked Sarah to pose with him while clinking the two halves together, an apparently auspicious portent of LAMP's success. 

The lucky LAMP banana

Post-midnight giggles are a thing during overnight campaigns, for sure. We did also manage to capture a fun group shot, complete with banana.

I'll leave you with the legendary Hans Nielsen striking his famous aurora-watching pose: 

I have multiple pictures of Hans in this same pose, spanning different years and geographic locations.