Autumn break

 

After a short, but busy stint at Summit I am now off to travel and rest before returning for the winter phase from mid-October thru February 2018.

Summit Station as seen from atop the 50m tower back in 2011.

Robot Boyz

Above all else Summit Station is a polar scientific research station. We are here for Science!
Much of the research done up here is in the vein of long term monitoring; an instrument is deployed to take measurements for months or years without needing specific personnel here on site aside from the Science Technicians. We have several suites of instruments from many different groups. Some measure black carbon in the atmosphere, others measure cloud height, type, and precipitation, there’s a lot of atmospheric monitoring in general, a seismometer, and several solar radiation sensors.
The other type of research involves bringing the researchers themselves up here – either to install instruments, drill cores, collect samples, or test new technologies. The flight periods are the busiest times on station with many groups coming up for just a few days or a week, but some groups stay between flight periods. This past month, between flight periods 4 and 5, we are supporting two PhD students from Dartmouth who are here working with a robot. The Cool Robot.

Their main objectives are to field test a new version of this robot, to prove that robotic surveys are feasible and practical. If they can be proven reliable robots could be used to track snow topography and elevation, ablation, accumulation, and all sorts of other parameters with significantly higher precision than the satellites we now rely on.
This particular robot is designed to follow a designated path while towing a ground penetrating radar (GPR) unit to measure compaction rates and densities. It is also carrying an infrared camera, which the researchers hope to measure exact surface area of the snow that can then be used to determine gas-air transfer rates. Finally, it includes a radiometer to measure the albedo of the surface – and thus how much solar energy it’s reflecting vs absorbing.

Solar panel patterns

Some of the issues they’ve had to deal with is the robot filling with snow in high winds, the tires sinking in soft snow, losing traction on hard snow, hitting steep drifts and getting pushed off course…it’s a sometimes slow process, but overall I believe they’ve had great success and have their issues to delve into this winter when they return home.
It’s a boxy little thing, covered in solar panels. It doesn’t move very fast, maybe a 5mph at most, and we’ve grown used to seeing it putter around camp from one site to another. Check out their webpage and field blog: http://sites.dartmouth.edu/polarregionsrobotics/field-blogs/greenland-2017

The “Robot Boyz” discuss annual layers in a back lit snow pit dug near station