There is a science group here right now (referred to as the Bhartia group, after the Principal Investigator of their project) consisting of four engineers from a robotics company called Honeybee Laboratories (based near L.A.) that is contracting with NASA to design and develop a drill that, in the next several decades, will be sent to Jupiter's moon, Europa. The drill will need to get through 20 kilometers off ice in order to reach an ocean that may contain organic life, which is what NASA will be searching for with the mission. In order to start to test the drill that might some day accomplish this, the Bhartia group has set up a camp 6 km from Summit Base to do some testing this summer. And this weekend, they invited us out to their camp to see their operations.
It was a very fun boondoggle, a bunch of us riding on a sled attached to a snow mobile, away from station along the vast, flat, white...
...to where the group has three tents set up: a kitchen tent, a poop tent, and their drilling tent, with the snowmobiles pointed back toward station and ready to go in case a polar bear is spotted heading in their direction (unlikely but possible).
Outside of their drilling tent, they made a snow inuksuk, an Inuit tradition, to bring their mission luck.
We all crowded into the drilling tent to hear about the progress they're making and some details of their intentions and work here. Definitely one of those moments where I get to feel part of something much greater, and like all of the shoveling and other dirty work I've been doing the past 7 weeks is for a real purpose.
It's not Europa now, but some day it really may be!
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