Here's CheMin!

I guess this would be a good time to introduce the instrument that I'm babysitting. We (my colleagues at inXitu and I) spent the summer building this instrument, so this is its maiden voyage. This version is the latest in a long pedigree of miniature X-ray diffraction instruments that David Blake and colleagues have been working on for the last 15 years or so. A parallel version is the one that has been selected for the Mars Science Laboratory mission that will be launched in late summer, 2009. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is building that version. Here is a movie of the MSL rover and CheMin.
Overall, we were very happy with the way the instrument performed, but it was nice to have a little downtime to fix small annoyances.

Catching up on work

When we arrived the next morning to the island of Nordauslandet, the weather was quite cold, and it had apparently snowed during the night.


A small party went ashore to investigate a seabird rookery, where lots of birds nest and fertilize the surrounding land. Meanwhile, I took advantage of the break in geological action (and being driven below decks by the cold wind) to get some work done. We had been collecting quite a few samples the last few days, and needed to run them in CheMin and add the results to the expedition database. Here's me drilling a rock to get a powdered sample to analyze:
The stylish purple gloves are to protect the sample from organic material from my hands.

80 degrees north

We pulled out of Bockfjorden in the evening and cruised north. It was exciting to leave the shelter of the fjord and head out into the open arctic ocean, with nothing between us and the north coast of Alaska but the north pole. The seas picked up considerably as we left the fjord, and although it was not rough by normal seafaring standards, I was a little worried about getting seasick, as I've spent a few fishing trips in the Gulf of Mexico feeding the fish. The only solution of course, was to stand out on deck and take the fresh air. Once you're out on deck, you might as well have a sip of aquavit to ward off the chill. So, a small group of us stood out on the deck, getting our sea legs and telling lies late into the evening. We passed the 80th parallel at about 1.30 in the evening, to renewed celebration.

I never did get seasick the whole trip. It was never very rough, although our lab was in the forecastle, and it did get a bit rolly up there at times. Seasickness is a funny thing. I've been sick in 1 ft seas, but fine in 6 ft seas in a 17 foot boat.

Shameless plug

I know you're all breathlessly pressing the refresh button on your browsers waiting for me to upload more pictures. I'll get to it soon, but while you're waiting, check out my other journal, where I convert an MGB to run on electricity.

Sverrefjell

The next day, we hiked up the cinder cone that had been looming over the ship for the last three days. This is a really interesting volcano. It's one of the few places that have ultramafic xenoliths, which are chunks of rock brought up from the mantle as the volcano was erupting. It's also interesting because some of the xenoliths contain carbonates that are similar to those in the ALH84001 Mars meteorite that was the center of quite a stir a few years ago, because some thought it contains microfossils (it doesn't).

A fox(?) vertebra:

It was snowing pretty good at the higher elevations:
The view from the summit:
The glaciers make the mountains very rugged. These mountains are only 500 meters or so, but they look like 4000 meter mountains in the US.

The biologists among us collected samples from an ice cave near the summit

Across the fjord are the Devonian red beds from the day before:

Science!

The next day, we went ashore to deploy the rover on some Devonian age (~400 million year old) rocks. I was part of the "science" group. In a real rover mission, scientists sit in a room in Pasadena and figure out what the rover should do. There are pretty well-established ways of planning what to do and what kind of images and other data to ask for. This was more of a pretend mission to give us all practice in bossing a rover. To make things a bit realistic, we weren't allowed to look at the site where the rover was deployed, so we would have to practice seeing through the rover's cameras. The first thing we learned about rovers is that they're very slow. I had plenty of time to take pictures between strategy meetings
Finally, we finished our last instruction to the rover, so we could go over to the rover area and take in the action.

Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, and a Polar bear all walk into a bar...

Another AMASE tradition is to dress up like Men in Black, and pose for pictures while holding rifles. This year, we got all gussied up and headed to shore. There were two zodiacs ferrying people to shore. The first zodiac hit the beach, and people began getting out, when Dave Blake in our zodiac, which was about 100 meters back, noticed a polar bear. We all started yelling our heads off and waving to get the attention of the shore party. They waved back. The bear noticed them, and started ambling over. When the bear was about 75 meters away, they finally noticed it, and jumped back in the boat. Morten snapped this picture as they motored away:
Not to be deterred, we landed on the other side of the fjord and had our pictures made.