Week 31 at the Pole

A meteor streaking through an aurora-filled night sky over the South Pole Telescope in the distance.
Aman Chokshi, SPT/NSF

Last week was action-packed at the South Pole. The beginning of the week had IceCube’s winterovers busy with diagnosing and troubleshooting some computer issues, which required a couple of visits to the IceCube Lab (ICL). They took advantage of these visits to also perform a few maintenance tasks at the ICL while they were there. But the bigger action was at the end of the week, when there was a power fluctuation that affected all of the science projects at the station and had most of the winterovers up and crowded into the science lab in the middle of the night to assess the impacts to their projects. A second fluctuation occurred just as things seemed to have stabilized, and while the power plant personnel investigated the situation, a complete blackout hit the station’s science lab. And…a second blackout hit before everything was eventually restored to normal. Last but not least, a meteor was spotted in the night sky, shown here with auroras over the South Pole Telescope.