Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 12/01/2010 - 10:14
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IceCube: In-ice Antarctic Telescope 2010

Ms Shirey,

I hope you are having fun at the South Pole!

I was wondering about the following:

  1. How long did it take to travel from the US to the South POle?

  2. How low do temperatures reach at the base camp?

  3. What has been the best part of your trip so far?

Thanks,

K. Clark Blue & Gray Staff

Wed, 12/01/2010 - 10:35

Anonymous

Ms. Shirey,1. Since you flew almost directly south rather than east or west, was there a change in time zones? If so how was recovering from the jet lag?
2. I understand that the neutrinos are too small to see with the naked eye, but do you have scans or computer images from the telescope that you could post on the site?
Thanks,
Carina Garcia
Blue & Grey Staff

Wed, 12/01/2010 - 14:36

Katey Shirey

Dear Carina,It's nice to hear from you. To answer your questions, From everywhere on the globe getting to the South Pole means going directly, exactly, south. However, I didn't do that exactly. I flew West and South to Christchurch, New Zealand where I adjusted to a time 18 hours ahead of Arlington, VA time. That is, when it's noon on Monday in Arlington it's 6AM on Tuesday in New Zealand. From New Zealand I flew to Antarctica's coast to a station called McMurdo Station. And then the next day I flew to South Pole Station. Both McMurdo and the South Pole use New Zealand time to make it easier to schedule flights in and out of New Zealand. It took a little getting used to, but now I'm pretty well acclimated to the time change. I think I recovered from the jet lag by forcing myself to stay up as late as I could (I made it to 9:00PM!) on my first nights in Christchurch.
2. No one has any scans or images of neutrinos. They are too small for any detector we could ever build. What we're doing to see them is to study the by products of neutrino collisions which are luckily large enough to make a reaction in the ice around them, so we can see the reaction which is light. But we don't have any images or scans of those after products either. This stuff is just too small. The closest thing to a picture of a neutrino that I can get you is a shot of what a neutrino event looks like in the IceCube detector--that looks like a bunch of those spherical digital optical modules lighting up as the light from the muon by products hits them and then a computer-generated line showing the path of the muon also indicating the path of the neutrino. I'll try to find that picture and pass it along.
Thanks for writing, please let me know if this makes any sense or not. It may be helpful to go back and read a few of the previous ask the team questions too--some of them also tackled this topic.