IceCube, the Antarctic neutrino detector that in July of 2018 helped unravel one of the oldest riddles in physics and astronomy — the origin of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays — is getting an upgrade.
IceCube was running smoothly last week. But it hasn’t been such smooth sailing this year for cargo arrivals (delays). On the plus side, a supply of IceCube beanie hats arrived!
Since it’s summer at the Pole, more people are arriving than leaving. However, last week two people departed who had been at the Pole for an extended time—yes, we’re talking about Benjamin Eberhardt and Kathrin Mallot, IceCube’s winterovers for the past year, shown here among the red parkas walking toward the plane above.
A plane landing in daylight means summer season and new arrivals at the South Pole. So far things have started off busy for IceCube’s new winterovers.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego; and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison successfully completed a computational experiment as part of a multi-institution collaboration that marshalled all globally available for sale GPUs (graphics processing units) across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform.
Two fresh faces have arrived at the Pole—IceCube’s next winterovers, John Hardin and Yuya Makino, ready for service. Here is the plane that brought them, a low-flying Basler.
