6 December, 2001

Two scientists from the Bartol Research Institute arrived at the South Pole, Xinhua Bai and Serap. They are both astroparcticle physics who will be completing the installation of the SPASE detector.

Most folks refer to Xinhua by his last name, due to their difficulty with pronouncing it correctly. Bai is quite a regular at the South Pole due to his deep involvement with AMANDA and SPASE. He wintered over at the South Pole the same year the Dr. Jerri Nelson had her dramatic rescue. Reading Dr. Nelson's account of the experience in 'Ice Bound', I found Bai's name mentioned a few times.

The previous year, Bai had set up a new type of telescope near the SPASE shack. This telescope was designed to see parcticles, rather than light. The specific parcticles he hopes to detect were muons. Muons are in the same family as electrons and they also carry a negative charge. The way that Bai's detector works is very similar to what we are currently trying to build.

The muon telescope that Bai designed works off the very well known principle that charged parcticles will emit light when passing through water. While Bai is here, we hope to conduct some experiments on his detector to see if we can confirm the data he obtained remotely.

Now that the scientists from Bartol are here, the detector that we have been constructing can be inspected. If everything is acceptable, we will be able to fill the tank with water by the weekend and start working on the freezing process.

Biological Data

Saturated Oxygen: 92%

Pulse Rate: 98

Weather Data

Temperature: -24.3

Wind Chill: -71.1

Jerry Poirier and Jason Petula using a heat gun.

Sun dogs created by the sun light reflecting off of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.