Heading out

Today the winds are much less, there are just a few light flurries, so I'm going out in an hour for a 7-hour traverse into the heart of the crater, gathering gravity measurements around the central anomaly. This will be hopefully added to a paper that was due in May, but has now slipped into August (long enough to add more results ;).

Weather looks to improve, clearing tomorrow and actually being sunny through Friday (!). I'll be leaving for Resolute either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning, to connect with Thursday afternoon flights back to Edmonton.

Finally... while we're back online after yesterday's storm, the dish is coming down Tuesday. So sometime between Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes, I'll be offline and unavailable by email or IP telephone, probably until reaching Edmonton Thursday evening.

Surreal moment

Friday night, IM with geekchick... we were talking about what she was listening to lately, among other subjects... I turned on the webcam... behind me, someone walked by in a spacesuit, while I was downloading "i" by Placebo from iTunes over our satellite link... to a tent, up here hundreds of miles from civilization. A slightly surreal moment... I can only wonder what it looked like to Cathy ;-).

Um, hello?

After a 7-hour, successful gravity traverse around Haughton Crater, I just minutes ago sat down at my laptop. LJ showed an entry from hopeforyou. The IP phone rang. I picked it up... it was Mike Fincke, science officer on the International Space Station. Yes, calling from orbit...

I waved over the Hamilton-Sundstrand spacesuit guys and put it on the speakerphone. The tent filled up... the connection wasn't bad, no worse than an analog cell phone with some static. Mike talked about following our activities here for the past couple of years, talked with the H-S guys about an upcoming spacewalk on Tuesday, and told Pascal that he hoped they'd be training here for a Mars mission someday.

Caller ID says "unknown number"...

( Here's the call... (photo) )