Oden Cruise
The Oden Cruise is a National Science Foundation (Office of Polar
Programs and the Office of International
Science and Engineering) project to calibrate an ice-based detector to
study the sun. It will extend the capabilities of the IceTop surface array at the
South Pole that is part of the international IceCube project.
An IceTop tank inside a freezer container went from Sweden to
Antarctica and back on the icebreaker Oden. The data acquisition system
recorded the event rate, latitude and longitude, barometric pressure, and
threshold setting for the light sensors inside the tank. Knowing the
location allows the geomagnetic cutoff to be determined. This is the
minimum rigidity (momentum per unit charge) that a particle needs to reach
the top of the atmosphere from interplanetary space, and hence can be used
to calibrate the response to low energy particles.
Three undergraduate students traveled on the Oden to help monitor the
tank and assist with operations on the ship. Drew Anderson (UWRF) traveled
on the first from Sweden to Montevideo, Uruguay. Samantha Jakel (UW-Rock
County, UW-Madison) took over next and accompanied the tank to McMurdo
Station, Antarctica. Finally, Kyle Jero (UWRF) went from McMurdo to Punta
Arenas, Chile.
Learn more about the trip from the student's
blogs!
Oden Data (Under Construction)
