IceCube

As the summer season at South Pole begins drawing to a close, I got to take one more field trip to one of the science projects down here. IceCube is the largest telescope in the world, though it's not something that I previously would have understood as a telescope. About a kilometer's walk from the station is the IceCube lab building...

Which is situated on top of a square kilometer of hot-drilled cores containing a total of about 5000 of these DOMs (digital optical monitors)...

...which have been engineered by scientists working on this UW-Madison project to detect neutrinos: particles that pass through the earth without interacting with anything. I won't try to explain beyond that because I'm sure I'll get something wrong. It's mesmerizing to watch the computer images of IceCube's data readings.

And it was pretty amazing to see the room where all the electronics for the project live, on a guided tour from the two scientists who are down here for a full year to keep the project up and running and make sure data is transferred back to those working on analyzing it at Wisconsin.

All of this is so beyond me, but the more I learn about the science going on here, the more lucky I feel to be a part of it in my own little way.