Today the wake up call came at 0125 to make a 0200 bus the the flight terminal and loading, security, flight safety briefing, etc. All was on schedule but we had to sit and wait for about a hour or so before loading ourselves, handy carry on items and a boomerang bag. The C17 crew came from McChord AFB (Tacoma WA) as part of operation deep freeze; this was my commissioning base when I went active duty in 1986. Another curious item came up today as we waited for our flight as the Today Show ran a special on Antarctica and emphasized McMurdo; this special rallied the troops and hastened our excitement for the day's adventure. Next came wheels up at 0445 Christchurch time with an expected 5.5 hour flight. The flight crew was fantastic; led by a LtCol and Captain but the guts of the team were the load masters and flight engineers who made the whole team effective and efficient. Our in flight brunch was a very good bag lunch with fruit and a larger water bottle; everyone enjoyed their meal and we have no rough air so no air sick passengers.
We landed very smoothly at Pegasus runway; a snow packed runway more than 12 miles off the continent and away from McMurdo Station. After offloading and snapping a few context pictures we boarded Ivan the Terra Bus; a fabulous machine built in Canada from the 1940s. This machine was our cross ice field transportion to New Zealand's Scott Station and the USA's McMurdo Station. The weather was generally good with occasionally broken skies but the winds were up and flurries swirled the air. After arriving at McMurdo we received a number of briefings about Station's community, safety and getting settled in the dorms. Next came the dreaded bag drag to haul all our personal and ECW gear to our rooms. Our Raytheon peers met us and assisted with getting where we needed to go and then off for a late lunch. Our first experience with the chow hall was a good one!
Next came a quick change our of the heavy ECW clothing and a walk to the Joint Satellite Operations and Control (JSOC) where our satellite data capture equipment was housed and operated. Engineers from Harris and Raytheon had been monitoring the new system's automation as DMSP began testing fully automated data recovery and routing to Offutt AFB. The testing was proceeding quite smoothly but the team had noted a couple of bugs in the system. It was apparent that the NOAA SOCC's configuration of the DMSP transmitter SGLS channel configuration was not correct. Harris staff rectified this issue by manually editing the SOCC's automated data recorder schedule and republishing it to Raytheon. Once corrected several passes were ingested without issue. Harris and Aerospace teamed up to connect our test laptop and RTD capture box to the Harris data distribution chassis. We patiently waited for the next for the next available F18 DMSP pass scheduled for Julian day 339 at 0257Z. The data began arriving on schedule and the OLS raster imagery appeared in our application's GUI like clockwork. We tracked several passes and all but one was nominal. I will be checking with our ETG partners as to whether the RTD capture box handles both nominal and inverted signal for the datastream; the latter is our hypothesis for the one dropped pass.
Enjoy the photos of the day's events; more to come over time as the Internet upload speed is limited and shared by 1,100+ users.
No comments:
Post a Comment