It's...cosmic, man

One of the major science projects was relocating Dr. Martin Pomerantz's Bartol cosmic ray project. This had been deferred due to lack of cargo flights because of the Dome C aircraft crashes. The first phase was to dig out and occupy the old cosray lab across the skiway to get a few days worth of baseline data. Here we can barely see the roof of the cosray hut. Here's a picture of what we're digging out before it got buried, this is from 1966 Bartol w/o Lars Andersson. Yes, that is our black D8...

Lots of hard work.

Here the work is almost done, we also had to clean the roof off. We put in a new Preway and set up a small generator to keep things running and charged (the detector instrumentation ran off of lead-acid batteries). The detectors were buried in lead bricks, some of which may still be sitting around the station today. Stu spent a night or two here, the last person in history to live in the original station.

The next phase...Stu Harris (left) and Fred Kahl (the McMurdo cosray guy) set up the equipment on the second floor of skylab. At left is the door to the stairs going up to the third floor...at this point the wall hadn't been built yet.
(the above four photos are from Les Rohde)

Setting the first of the cosmic ray detectors on the platform behind skylab (yes, Dr. Pomerantz showed up to make sure everything was running properly). These are lead boxes containing detector assemblies--the world's most sensitive cosray detectors at the time. 99.9% of the data was collected by Stu on mag tape to get shipped out at the end of the winter, but he watched for significant stuff. One day he found evidence of a "solar cosmic ray event" but of course before he could transmit this important data back to Bartol, the solar cosmic ray event wiped out our HF radio comms...go figure. Nowadays these are called "neutron monitors" and up through the end of the 2005 winter they were still there with their smiley faces and doing their thing. More recently some unshielded monitors hanging from the ceiling of the top floor of skylab were installed. The project lost its funding when skylab was decommissioned in November 2005...but funding was renewed in 2009-10, when the detector platform was relocated in front of the new station near the skiway. At left is an NSF photo from the Antarctic Journal, Vol. XII #4, October 1977, p. 199.

At right is Tadashi's 1976-77 view of the cosray platform behind Skylab. Below, a 1997 photo of the detectors by Leonard Shulman, from the University of Delaware/Bartol site.

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