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Thursday
- February 1, 2001
By A. Bier
As
always, there is good news and there is bad news.
The
good news is that we have the disks back here ready
to be plugged into the fake bottom system. The
bad news is that this may be all we ever see of
TopHat ever again.
The
gondola did not land on the ice shelf—it missed
by perhaps half a mile. This put it halfway up a
forty degree slope. As you might imagine, it didn’t
stay there very long, and rolled three or four hundred
feet down the hill. All of the solar panels were
completely destroyed, although the main structure
is intact—it was rolling on snow rather than rock.
Accessibility
was horrible. The Twin Otter had to land on a chunk
of snow that sloped at a compound angle and was
bordered on two sides by very steep glacial slopes,
on one by a rock field, and the fourth by a crevasse
field big enough to swallow houses. I have promised
myself not to get nervous in passenger aircraft
ever again—they land on nice straight flat pieces
of pavement.
The
other problem is range: the gondola lies roughly
250 miles from the pole and 350 from Mcmurdo. This
is beyond the range of a Twin Otter unless it has
been equipped with external tanks, which ours had
not. We had to make a dogleg journey to Ice Stream
Charlie in order to pick up more fuel. After circling
for about half an hour while trying to send the
terminate command, we only had a fuel margin of
about twenty minutes, which prevented us from even
looking for the top package. This is especially
unfortunate as it looked as though it was going
to have a very soft landing—it was actually coming
down slower than the gondola! So the top package
is somewhere on the ice shelf. A little careful
thinking would probably narrow its location to fifteen
square miles or so, but this is still a hell of
a lot of area.
Questions
will be answered in twelve hours or so.
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