At Sky-Blu

So what was I doing at Sky-Blu? It was part of the UK Antarctic Meteorites project - see https://ukantarcticmeteorites.com/ for all the details, but aims to find buried, hidden iron meteorites in those blue ice areas that naturally concentrate meteorites. So while Katie and Julie are a few hundred miles south of Halley checking out likely blue ice areas (and finding lots of meteorites - 34 so far this season), Geoff and I are testing the giant metal detector that we will use to find the buried iron ones.

Here we are building it:

And here I am giving it its inaugural tow:

It has to be relatively robust as it needs to be towed for many hundreds of km over hard ice, there are some minor improvements to make but it basically works.

The key bit of testing was collecting data from the electronics for how it reacts to test samples that we had buried at various depths. This will allow the digital processing to be tuned back in Manchester so that we have optimal signal to noise.

Here it is all wired up.

The solar panels keep the batteries full so it is always ready to tow, although they do give some stability issues so we may put them at the campsite and swap a charged battery in/out each time it is used.