What have I been doing? So far I have been pretty busy. The CosRay building is being decommissioned. It is fairly far away from the station and is difficut to maintain so they are shutting it down. The placement of the CosRay building wasn't an accident though. McMurdo Station used to have a nuclear reactor. The CosRay building was moved to the opposite side of Observation Hill so there was a mountain in between the neutron monitors and the reactor. They didn't want to detect the neutrons from the reactor and the mountain provided shielding. The reactor has since been removed to eliminate any chance of affecting the environment. However the neutron monitors are still producing good data and remain the longest continuously running experiment in Antartica. So they want to keep them running. They are being shipped to the South Korean station, Jang Bogo. Jang Bogo is a comparable distance from the magnetic pole so it's a good fit. Even though Jang Bogo is only about 350 km away the neutron monitors will be shipped to New Zealand and then over to Jang Bogo as that there are no regular shipments between the two stations.
Neutron Monitors While Installed (They just look like a big box, right?!)
The process of pulling apart the neutron monitors is no small task. Remember the neutron monitors are completely enclosed in polyethylene to screen out low energy neutrons and polyethylene is heavy (as my back can attest to.) Oh yeah, each set of detector tubes has about 10 tons of lead. And there are two sets.
This is what is in the box. Each peace of lead is 200 pounds.
Yup, we moved twenty tons of lead on a handcart two hundred pounds at a time. I think I need a nap.
One set of monitors filled up this shipping container. They had to go get a bigger forklift to move it.
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