Jeffrey Donenfeld

Category: Science

LG NOVA Webinar Series: Innovation 2023 – Digital Health
Thanks to the LG Nova Digital Health team – Atul Singh and Darren Sabo for hosting this morning an interesting session Healthcare Innovation. A few notes from today’s session:

Challenges and Opportunities for digital health innovation
- Digital interoperability
- Data privacy and security
- Digital Infrastructure
- Regulatory environment for digital health services
- Staff shortage and burnout
- Acute care in the home setting
- Artificial intelligence in healthcare
  - (Singh) Elective surgery backlog – opportunity for AI to accelerate the process of streamlining patient care? Evidence based recommendations to clinicians?
  - (Singh) AI assisted robotic surgery – limited and cutting edge at the moment. Enhanging precision, reducing invasiveness.
  - (Singh) AI used more readily in operations center – reduce workloads, reducing wait times through checkin resource allocation, billing.
  - (Sabo) AI – Augmented Intelligence – AI helping clinicians make decisions- augmentatiuon and assistance vs replacement.
  - AI used to understand how elements of your community can affect patient health
  - (Sabo) VR/AR healthcare training – both procedures, as well as patient contact.
- Using digital tools to improve care coordination. Once patient leaves acute setting, there are opportunities to streamline management of the patient journey. Reduce readmittence.
- Nanotechnoloiges – precise delivery of drugs, enhanced capabilities of diagnostic tools.
- Digital life printing – 3D printing organs
About LG Nova Digital Health

As digital health technology continues to evolve, it presents unprecedented opportunities to enhance patient care, improve access to services, and revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered. In this 60-minute webinar, we will delve into the diverse facets of digital health and explore cutting-edge advancements shaping healthcare’s future. Our speakers will share based on their current roles and previous experience in digital health innovation.

Discussion Topics
- Overview of the current landscape and trends in digital health
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare
- Insights & strategies for digital health startups and entrepreneurs
- The Patient Journey – Impact on healthcare and patient outcomes
- A look into the future – Exploring emerging technologies in healthcare
2023-06-13
Viewing the Total Solar Eclipse, August 21st, 2017

A few of my shots, and NASA’s map from today’s spectacular Total Solar Eclipse, which I viewed from Guernsey, Wyoming.

2017-08-21
Orion – NASA’s Newest Spacecraft

Love this explainer video – can’t wait for the first full launch!

As the flight test of NASA’s Orion spacecraft nears, the agency released Wednesday a video — called “Trial By Fire” — detailing the spacecraft’s test and the critical systems engineers will evaluate during the Dec. 4 flight.

Orion is in the final stages of preparation for the uncrewed flight test that will take it 3,600 miles above Earth on a 4.5-hour mission to test many of the systems necessary for future human missions into deep space. After two orbits, Orion will reenter Earth’s atmosphere at almost 20,000 miles per hour, and reach temperatures near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit before its parachute system deploys to slow the spacecraft for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

On future missions, Orion will carry astronauts farther into the solar system than ever before, including to an asteroid and Mars. From NASA

Direct Download

2014-12-01
My Footage from the South Pole used in “The Science of Interstellar” Documentary

Coinciding with the release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie “Interstellar”, Warner Brothers has released a new documentary called “The Science of Interstellar” – and my footage is in it! The documentary covers the science roots behind the hollywood film, including science looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background. During my time living and working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica I took a bit of footage while snowmobiling out to the Bicep2 Microwave Telescope. Gemini Productions, the producer of the documentary, found my footage on my YouTube Channel, and licensed a few seconds of it for this documentary. Glad to be able to help out and be very very minorly involved with Interstellar! My footage appears at

Screengrabs, video links:

Matthew McConaughey narrates this behind-the-scenes look at the epic voyage to deep space depicted in the movie Interstellar. Director Christopher Nolan worked with top physicists to create a realistic trip to distant solar systems.

Discovery Channel: The Science of ‘Interstellar’
Rls date: Nov 6, 2014
Genre: Documentary

Played.to video link
Vidto.me video link
Description

2014-11-26
I’m In A Planetarium Show! “Chasing the Ghost Particle”

Chasing the Ghost Particle is a co-production of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Milwaukee Public Museum. (Poster PDF)

During my deployment to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica in the Austral Summer 2012-2013, my good friend Blaise was working with the Daniel M. Soref Planetarium at the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Throughout the summer season, Blaise worked with a RED HD Video Camera and a very wide angle lens to film daily lives around the station- including mine, as well as various aspects of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory.

The footage Blaise captured was produced into the planetarium presentation “Chasing the Ghost Particle: From the South Pole to the Edge of the Universe“, released December 2013, and playing at planetariums nationwide. (Full Dome Database Listing)

From University of Wisconsin:

Deep in the ice at the heart of Antarctica, IceCube, the biggest and strangest detector in the world waits for mysterious messengers from the cosmos. Scientists are using tiny and elusive particles called neutrinos to explore the most extreme places in the universe. These ghostly neutrinos give us an exclusive way to study powerful cosmic engines like exploding stars and black holes.

In this 30-minute show, stunning simulations of the most energetic places in our universe, and the galaxies around us, are the prelude to a thrilling journey inside IceCube, looking for traces of neutrino collisions in the ice. From one of the most remote locations on Earth to the unexplored regions of the cosmos, Chasing the Ghost Particle: From the South Pole to the Edge of the Universe will take you on a journey you won’t forget.

Since I was working on the station during filming, I’m actually in the planetarium movie a few times, which is very cool! Screen grabs included, and a “demo copy” of the film is included below.

(Full show demo is from Full Dome Database, and I claim no rights or permissions)

(Trailer on YouTube)

2014-09-28
The Illustris Project is Simulated Beauty

The Illustris Project just released their preliminary results, and it’s nothing short of incredible. Although their simulation is massively complex, I particularly love checking out the fantastic graphics they’re able to generate from the data, available on their media page.

Explore the Illustris Simulation Data

More on Illustris:

Motivation & Big Ideas
The standard model of cosmology posits that the mass-energy density of the Universe is dominated by unknown forms of dark matter and dark energy. Testing this extraordinary scenario requires precise predictions for the formation of structure in the visible matter, which is directly observable as stars, diffuse gas, and accreting black holes. These components of the visible matter are organized in a ‘Cosmic Web’ of sheets, filaments, and voids, inside which the basic units of cosmic structure – galaxies – are embedded. To test our current ideas on the formation and evolution of galaxies, we strive to create simulated galaxies as detailed and realistic as possible, and compare them to galaxies observed in the real universe. By probing our successes and failures, we can further enhance our understanding of the galaxy formation process, and thereby perhaps realize something fundamental about the world in which we live.

The Illustris project is a set of large-scale cosmological simulations, including the most ambitious simulation of galaxy formation yet performed. The calculation tracks the expansion of the universe, the gravitational pull of matter onto itself, the motion or “hydrodynamics” of cosmic gas, as well as the formation of stars and black holes. These physical components and processes are all modeled starting from initial conditions resembling the very young universe 300,000 years after the Big Bang and until the present day, spanning over 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. The simulated volume contains tens of thousands of galaxies captured in high-detail, covering a wide range of masses, rates of star formation, shapes, sizes, and with properties that agree well with the galaxy population observed in the real universe. We are currently working to make detailed comparisons of our simulation box to these observed galaxy populations, and some exciting promising results have already been published.

Direct Video Link

2014-05-08
First Results From The BICEP2 CMB Telescope Announced re: Gravitational Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background
A little over a year ago, I had the extraordinary opportunity to work with scientists John Kovac, Jon Kaufman, Howard Hui, and others at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica (summary of my experience living and working at the south pole) on the BICEP2 and KECK Array Microwave Telescopes. Learning about how the telescopes worked, as well as the science behind what they were doing directly from the scientists involved was a great opportunity, and I was happy to be able to make my small contribution to the project.
RESULTS

“Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the “first tremors of the Big Bang.” Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.”

Announcement from NASA JPL:

Astronomers are announcing today that they have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

The findings were made with the help of NASA-developed detector technology on the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation.

“Operating the latest detectors in ground-based and balloon-borne experiments allows us to mature these technologies for space missions and, in the process, make discoveries about the universe,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director in Washington.

This morning, they announced their first set of results from Bicep2 at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics:

From Sean Carrol:
Monday morning: here are results! First, the best fit to r, the ratio of gravitational waves to density perturbations:
- BICEP2 2014 Results Release
  - PDF: BICEP2 II: EXPERIMENT AND THREE-YEAR DATA SET
  - PDF: BICEP2 I: DETECTION OF B-mode POLARIZATION AT DEGREE ANGULAR SCALES
- Sean Carrol: Gravitational Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background
And a bit of press from around the web:
Snowmobiling to the Dark Sector Laboratory

Physicist Jon Kaufman stands on top of the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory.

Physicist Jon Kaufman gives me a tour of the BICEP2 Telescope..

Views: Dark Sector Laboratory, South Pole, Antarctica by Google Maps

Pics from working on KECK…

Appearing on front page of NY Times
2014-03-17
Infographic: Major Icebreakers of the World

Great infographic today thanks to the US Coast Guard – a comprehensive review of the world’s major icebreakers. My next task, sail on all of them!

From the United States Naval Institute:

“The Coast Guard Office of Waterways and Ocean Policy (CG-WWM) began producing the chart of major icebreakers of the world in July 2010. Since then, we have gathered icebreaker information and recommendations from a variety of sources and experts, including icebreaker subject-matter experts, internet posts, news updates, Arctic experts and Coast Guard offices with icebreaker equities. We validate our information within the public forum and update the chart at least semi-annually based on new information and feedback. This chart represents the Coast Guard’s current factual understanding of the major icebreaker fleet. This chart is not intended for icebreaker fleet comparisons and no inference should be drawn regarding a country’s icebreaker “ranking” against another.”

U.S. Coast Guard's 2013 Review of Major Icebreakers of the World | USNI News.

2014-02-18
Learning to MIG Weld

Last night I took a class through Denver’s new learning startup Dabble on MIG Welding. The class was taught by structural engineer Nick Geurts of Martino & Luth, Inc.. During the class, hosted in Nick’s backyard garage and workshop, we covered the very basics of welding techniques, and then some of the specifics of entry level MIG Welding on mild steel. After welding a few pieces of steel together, I felt pretty confident in making a basically usable weld – although certainly not perfect or professional.

Mig Welding, from Wikipedia:

Gas metal arc welding (GMAW), sometimes referred to by its subtypes metal inert gas (MIG) welding or metal active gas (MAG) welding, is a welding process in which an electric arc forms between a consumable wire electrode and the workpiece metal(s), which heats the workpiece metal(s), causing them to melt, and join. Along with the wire electrode, a shielding gas feeds through the welding gun, which shields the process from contaminants in the air. The process can be semi-automatic or automatic. A constant voltage, direct current power source is most commonly used with GMAW, but constant current systems, as well as alternating current, can be used. There are four primary methods of metal transfer in GMAW, called globular, short-circuiting, spray, and pulsed-spray, each of which has distinct properties and corresponding advantages and limitations.

Find out more about Nick’s class at Dabble.

2014-02-06
The Coldest Place in the World: Dome Argus, East Antarctica

NASA recently revealed that a spot in Antarctica just hit a record -135.3 degrees F below zero – that’s cold! In my time at the south pole, the coldest I experienced was -60F – not even close to the record.

This image shows the location of record low temperature measurements for Antarctica. From NBC News.

Fron NBC News:

Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the new record is “50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota.”

“It’s more like you’d see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles,” Scambos said, from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco Monday, where he announced the data. “I’m confident that these pockets are the coldest places on Earth.”

Here’s a quick explainer video.

Me in the South Pole Ice Tunnels

2013-12-11
Scientist Terry Benson Presents On “Innovations in Hot Water Drilling at the South Pole”

Last Austral Summer, I spent 3.5 months living at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. Among my many jobs on station, one of the most rewarding was the work I did with the Askaryan Radio Array drill and deployment teams. During my time working with the ARA, I got to spend some good time with Scientist Terry Benson. Here’s his excellent slide deck going over the science he’s working on at the South Pole, including details of the ARA Drill Rig I helped construct and test. Specifically, I helped construct the water tank overflow gutter, wired up the emergency stop switches, troubleshoot the main pump system, maintained the hose bindings, and tended to the drill as it operated.

Innovations in Hot Water Drilling at the South Pole

2013-11-28
Government Shutdown Halts United States Antarctic Program – Save Science in Antarctica!
It’s truly a sad day for Antarctica. Because of the government furlough, science operations in Antarctica is being shut down as funds dry up, as a “result of the absence of appropriation and the Antideficiency Act.”, according to the official USAP.gov website.

Amidst all of the other shakeup and struggle operations in Antarctica have gone through in recent years, I’m sad to hear that another setback has fallen on operations on the ice. So much good science and engineering research is being done there, it’s a shame that the small fraction of the budget that is needed to support the USAP has been suspended. A breakdown of the actual cost of the program, from Change.org:

The total cost of the USAP program is approximately $350 million dollars. A value added amount of money which is small in terms of the $3.8 trillion dollar total budget that would be trivial not to have congress authorize a portion of it to allow international science to continue.

With any luck, the furlough will end soon, and funds will be made available again before too much of the continent has been emptied out. Effects of the shutdown, from Change.org:

The effects this shutdown will be the loss of continuity in projects that have been ongoing since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) some 50 years ago. Scientific data such as the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) which has been ongoing for 30 years will have a large data gap in at a crucial time in our understanding of climate change. A similar problem would be the abrupt end to 11 years of continuous data on the solar cycle that is used, for example, by the UC Boulder Lidar project. Since solar cycles are 11 years long, missing this last critical bit of data could jeopardize the multi-year investment. Also threatened is our understanding of rapidly changing ecosystems that is being generated by the study of Penguins in the Palmer Peninsula.

Leaving Antarctica at the end of the 2012-2013 Austral Summer Season.

The full explanation on USAP.gov reads:

Planning and Implementation of Caretaker Status for U.S. Antarctic Program
October 8, 2013

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is responsible for managing and coordinating the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) on behalf of the nation. This includes providing support personnel and facilities and coordinating transportation and other logistics for scientific research. Due to the lapse in appropriation, funds for this support will be depleted on or about October 14, 2013.

Without additional funding, NSF has directed its Antarctic support contractor to begin planning and implementing caretaker status for research stations, ships and other assets. The agency is required to take this step as a result of the absence of appropriation and the Antideficiency Act.

Under caretaker status, the USAP will be staffed at a minimal level to ensure human safety and preserve government property, including the three primary research stations, ships and associated research facilities. All field and research activities not essential to human safety and preservation of property will be suspended.

As NSF moves to caretaker status, it will also develop the information needed to restore the 2013-14 austral summer research program to the maximum extent possible, once an appropriation materializes. It is important to note, however, that some activities cannot be restarted once seasonally dependent windows for research and operations have passed, the seasonal workforce is released, science activities are curtailed and operations are reduced.

NSF remains committed to protecting the safety and health of its deployed personnel and to its stewardship of the USAP under these challenging circumstances.

Help support continued operations in Antarctica by signing Change.org’s petition.

More coverage of this story:
2013-10-10
Building Electronics For Antarctica’s Automatic Geophysical Observatories Network

Among the many science experiments taking place at South Pole one of the more interesting field experiments is AGO – the Automatic Geophysical Observatories Network. While Research Scientist Dr. Bob Melville and his team were stationed here at the South Pole Station, I had the opportunuty to help build various electronics, which were subsequently installed at the AGO remote field sensor sites. It was a great experience working with them this year, and I’m certainly hoping to continue my involvement during future seasons on the ice.

A bit about AGO, from the University of Maryland:

Continued progress in understanding the Sun’s influence on the structure and dynamics of the Earth’s upper atmosphere depends upon increasing knowledge of the electrodynamics of the polar cap region and the key role that this region plays in coupling the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere. Measurements that are central to understanding include the electric field convection pattern across the polar cap and knowledge of the response of the atmosphere to the many forms of high-latitude wave and particle energy inputs during both geomagnetically quiet and disturbed situations.

The U.S. AGO network, which consists of a suite of nearly identical instruments (optical and radio wave auroral imagers, magnetometers, and narrow and wide band radio receivers) at six locations on the polar plateau, actively studies the coupling of the solar wind to ionospheric and magnetospheric processes, emphasizing polar cap dynamics, substorm phenomena, and space weather.

2013-01-15
An Astronaut at the South Pole: Dr. Scott Parazynski Visits The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Here at the south pole, we get lots of visitors – and many of them are extremely interesting. This past week I had the honor of meeting NASA Astronaut Scott E. Parazynski, MD. Dr. Parazynzki is now working as the Medical Director of the United States Antarctic Program. Having dinner with both Dr. Parazynzki as well as Dr. Sean Roden, former International Space Station Lead Flight Surgeon and now South Pole Chief MD was extremely interesting. Among other things, we discussed the various missions that Dr. Parazynzki and Dr. Roden had worked together on, as well as a few of the more interesting logistics for Antarctic medicine.

2013-01-14
The BLAST-Pol Balloon-Borne Submillimeter-Wave Telescope Launches From McMurdo Station, Antarctica

Although this happened at McMurdo and I didn’t get to see it personally, it’s still cool – a high altitude weather balloon launch in Antarctica.

BLAST-Pol is a balloon-borne submillimeter-wave telescope designed to study star formation in our galaxy. It was launched on its 2012 long-duration stratospheric balloon flight by the crew of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility on December 26, 2012 from Willy Field near McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

2013-01-10
Is It Really Snowing At The South Pole?

Last week, amidst some interesting weather, blowing snow, and what looked like (to the untrained observer) real snow falling, I reported that we were actually getting snow at the South Pole. As it turns out, the precipitation we received here was actually “snow grains”, not real snow. To clear up a bit of the confusion, and fill my in on general weather phenomenon here, I asked our Meteorologist Phillip Marzette a few questions.

Over the last few days here at the south pole, I’ve noticed some snow-like precipitation. I hear it’s exceedingly rare to get actual snow here. Was that snow we got, or something else? How often does it actually snow here? What’s the main form of precipitation?

As far as precipitation at South Pole, they come in three forms; ice crystals, snow grains and snow. Ice crystals appear about 90% of the time and are the product of water vapor after it encounters very cold and dry air poleward. Snow is made up of six-sided dendrite branch crystals. These are rare at South Pole and occur with warmer temperatures. Snow grains (8-9% occurrence), like snow, occur in warmer temperatures but they are more opaque, graupel-like in structure. Snow grains are what you saw out there, Jeffrey and there hasn’t been any “snow” recorded so far this season.

So, if we’re in a desert here and there’s such low amounts of precipitation, why is the ground covered with snow? Why isn’t it just slick ice on the surface?

The snow on the ground has mainly to do with the continent drifting towards the polar regions over millions of years. During that time, accumulations here have topped out at 2 miles while places further into the continent are at 3 miles. The ANDRILL project here on the continent can tell you more about that than I can. Over time, the snow hasn’t had a chance to melt and refreeze into ice that we are accustomed to, so the ground is still soft to walk on at South Pole.

ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) is a multinational collaboration comprised of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from seven nations (Brazil, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic margin using Cape Roberts Project (CRP) technology. The chief objective is to drill back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will guide our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequent were glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region. Future scenarios of global warming require guidance and constraint from past history that will reveal potential timing frequency and site of future changes.

In addition to the light precipitation we’ve had lately, there’s also been a thick cloud cover, and it’s also been very warm – maybe around -10F. Do these have anything to do with each other?

As far as clouds bringing us warmer weather, that’s a two part answer. The first part being that clouds in general do a good job in trapping in longwave radiation, thereby keeping our temperatures up. The second part is a tad more complicated, but I’ll try to explain. At South Pole, the coldest air settles at the surface and the air is warmer above us. This condition is called an inversion. When cold air meets warmer air, conditions become calmer, while when warm air meets cold air, that’s when we get clouds. When we have low pressure air moves upward from the surface, while when we have high pressure air moves downward to the surface. During low pressure at Pole, the colder air at the surface meets the “warmer” air aloft and conditions are pretty good. During high pressure events, the warmer air goes down to the cold air and we get our clouds, precipitation and otherwise bad weather.

So far during my time here on the ice (Since November 13th), I’ve seen ice crystals drifting in the air, sundogs, thick haze, weird wave-like clouds, and driving winds. What other special weather phenomenon are you looking forward to seeing during the summer season? Anything really special we haven’t seen yet?

As far as anything else that pops up, we do have some Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds (the clouds that look like ocean waves, due to different layers of stability in the atmosphere) that show up from time to time. Other than that, it just learning more and more about what weather events occur normally at South Pole that I would not see anywhere else around the world.

This image was obtained just south of Laramie, Wyoming (Home to the University of Wyoming) by Patrick Shea on the morning of August 6, 2007 between 8am and 9am. Courtesy of the eFluids image gallery. https://www.efluids.com/efluids/gallery/gallery_pages/cloud_instability_2.jsp

Thanks Phil!

2013-01-02
Cryo Barn’s Last Liquid Helium Transfer
The South Pole Cryogenics Laboratory, usually known as Cryo Barn, was originally established to service various telescopes and science experiments with cryogenic cooling liquids such as Liquid Helium and Liquid Nitrogen. However, in recent years, most new experiments which operate at cold temperatures have been of the “closed loop” variety – that is, they don’t vent or leak any of their coolant. Therefore, most of the new experiments don’t need the regular coolant refils that Cryo Barn was built to provide. Last week, I got to watch as the last Liquid Helium dewar was filled from the main tank, and then shipped off to the Bicep2 CMB Telescope.

Cryogenics Technician Flint Hamblin prepares the main Liquid Helium holding tank for transfer to the smaller transport dewar.

Fill volume of the dewar is measured by weight, and here Flint is seen checking the dewar weight as it’s suspended from the ceiling.

Liquid Helium is at about 4 Kelvin, or -452.2 degrees Fahrenheit. During the fill, the valves and piping that handle the liquid helium get extremely cold. In fact, they get cold enough to condense out the gasses from the air, turning the air into liquid. In this picture, the wet drips seen coming off the exhaust nozzle are drips of liquid nitrogen and oxygen condensed out of the surrounding air. Basically liquid air. The small grey plume coming out of the tip of the nozzle is actually a small amount of liquid helium, instantly vaporizing. The small white crust seen at the tip of the nozzle is solid air.

The dewar is transported from Cryo to MAPO on a sled pulled by a snowmobile. Here’s Flint and Physicist Jon Kaufman on the snowmobile, as I ride on the sled with the dewar.

The final step of the process, hoisting the dewar up into MAPO, where it’s used to fill the Bicep2 CMB telescope.

Liquid helium plays a crucial role in the operation and effectiveness of microwave telescopes. Here are five key points about its use:¹
1. Cooling of Instruments: Liquid helium is used to cool the sensitive instruments and detectors of microwave telescopes to extremely low temperatures, often close to absolute zero (approximately -273.15°C or -459.67°F). This is essential because it significantly reduces thermal noise, which can obscure the weak microwave signals from space that the telescopes are trying to detect.
2. Increased Sensitivity: By reducing thermal noise through cooling, liquid helium enhances the sensitivity of microwave telescopes. This increased sensitivity allows astronomers to detect faint microwave emissions and cosmic microwave background radiation with greater clarity, leading to more accurate measurements and observations.
3. Maintenance of Superconducting States: Certain components within microwave telescopes, such as superconducting magnets and quantum sensors, require a superconducting state to function optimally. Liquid helium is used to maintain the temperature conditions necessary for these components to achieve and sustain superconductivity, thereby ensuring the high performance of the telescope’s systems.
4. Long-duration Observations: The use of liquid helium enables microwave telescopes to conduct extended observations without the need for frequent recalibrations due to thermal fluctuations. This stability is crucial for long-term studies of the universe, such as monitoring the cosmic microwave background over time to understand the evolution of the universe.
5. Enabling Ground-based and Space-based Observations: While liquid helium is a critical resource for ground-based microwave telescopes, it is also vital for space-based telescopes. In the vacuum of space, where radiative cooling is limited, liquid helium is used to cool instruments to the necessary temperatures for observing the universe in microwave frequencies without the interference from Earth’s atmosphere.
In summary, liquid helium is indispensable for the operation of microwave telescopes, enhancing their performance by cooling sensitive components, reducing noise, maintaining superconductivity, allowing for prolonged observations, and enabling both ground-based and space-based astronomy.
1. Generated by ChatGPT-4, 2024-03 ↩︎
2012-12-26
The Southern Pole Of Inaccessibility

Since moving to the south pole, I’ve learned an incredible amount of new terms to describe the area around where I’m living. One such term is “Pole of Inaccessibility”.

From Wikipedia: The old Soviet Pole of Inaccessibility Station, revisited by Team N2i on 19 January 2007

From Wikipedia:

The southern pole of inaccessibility is the point on the Antarctic continent most distant from the Southern Ocean. A variety of coordinate locations have been given for this pole. The discrepancies are due to the question of whether the “coast” is measured to the grounding line or to the edges of ice shelves, the difficulty of determining the location of the “solid” coastline, the movement of ice sheets and improvements in the accuracy of survey data over the years, as well as possible typographical errors. The pole of inaccessibility commonly refers to the site of the Soviet Union research station mentioned below, which lies at 82°06?S 54°58?E[4] (though some sources give 83°06?S 54°58?E[5]). This lies 878 km (545 statute miles) from the South Pole, at an elevation of 3,718 m (12,198 ft). Using different criteria, the Scott Polar Research Institute locates the pole at 85°50?S 65°47?E.[6]

So, it seems like I’m not living at THE most inaccessibly place in Antarctica, but it’s darn close.

From Wikipedia: Map of distance to the nearest coastline[1] (including oceanic islands, but not lakes) with red spots marking the poles of inaccessibility of main landmasses, Great Britain, and the Iberian Peninsula. Thin isolines are 250 km apart; thick lines 1000 km. Mollweide projection.

2012-12-04
Getting To The Heart Of The Keck Array Microwave Telescope: Cryostat Disassembly
This week, I was fortunate to be given unprecedented access to the Keck Array Microwave Telescope in the MAPO Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station by the Keck Array Science Team, in order to witness the disassembly of two of the five cryostats that form the telscope array. Photos.

The Keck array is a microwave telescope, just like Bicep2 and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). However, Keck (or SPUD, as some call it, depending on which side of the funding table the person you’re asking is sitting) is special. Keck, in an effort to up sensitivity and resolution, has taken the best of all worlds, and combined them into one super-telescope. They’ve taken the extremely successful and proven focal plane design from Bicep2, as well as the extremely efficient and self contained pulse-tube cooled cryostat from SPT, and made it into their own super telescope. And then multiplied it by five.

The Keck has not one, but five identical cryostats, each housing its own focal plane. Having five instead of one gives the team an incredible amount of sensing options and flexibility. One distinct advantage that I was able to see up close and personal is that individual parts can be serviced and worked on without bringing the entire telescope to a halt.

More info on the Keck Array:
This past week, the Keck Array science team removed two of the five cryostats, and left three in place and operational.

Here are a few photos of the disassembly of the cryostats, stripping away all of their shielding and refrigeration to get to the heart – the focal plane.

Photos from the disassembly…

Keck Array is housed in the MAPO Observatory, a 15 minute walk from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Although it’s only a short ways away, in -40 degree F temperatures, full sunlight, driving wind, and an active ice runway to cross, full gear and extreme caution must be used on the walk across the ice. It feels a bit like walking to class – although much colder. And at one of the most remote spots on the planet. That big plywood cone in the background in the groundshield of the telescope.

Looking straight up inside the telescope, as Scientist Colin Bischoff explains the inner workings.

https://flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/8229064838/in/set-72157632128663490/lightbox/

Before disassembly, the cryostats are inspected for defects or light leaks.

Disassembly begins – very slowly and carefully – each cryostat is custom built and unique, the result of thousands of hours of R&D.

The team mid-project. I even got to help out a bit!

The inner core is revealed. This is the core refrigerator that’s responsible for cooling the focal plane down to an incredible 250 millikelvin. That’s just barely above absolute zero. The refrigerator uses both commonplace Helium-4, as well as exotic Helium-3, which is contained within the smaller titanium pressure vessel in the close-up shot.

And finally, the heart of the beast – the focal plane. These four panels sense polarization of focused microwave radiation using chips filled with TES Bolometers. More info on Bicep2 and Keck’s TES Bolometers from NASA JPL:

Transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers sense small temperature changes that occur when photons are absorbed and converted to heat. The use of TESs enables arrays with a much larger number of pixels than is practical with spider-web bolometers. Sustaining its leading role in superconducting TES array technology, MDL developed and continues to improve a process to create arrays of thousands of TESs with high yield (>90 percent). These arrays are being employed on three major astro physics projects, all with the same goal: generating detailed maps of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

https://flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/8229070600/in/set-72157632128663490/lightbox/

That’s it. Thanks very much to the entire Keck Array Science Team for generously inviting me into their lab.
2012-11-28
Refilling the Liquid Helium of Bicep2

A week or two ago, Physicist Jon Kaufman gave me a brief tour of the Bicep2 Microwave Telescope, operating here at the South Pole. Aa I reported earlier, the telescope operates at a very very low temperature – only a few millikelvin above absolute zero. In this particular telescope, to get down to that temperature, liquid helium is used in a series of nested cryostats – each reducing the temperature further. In order to maintain the cold temperature needed, liquid helium must periodically be added from an outside source. A few photos of Jon performing a recent refill of liquid helium:

Here’s what the master control console looks like.

Jon taking a few notes before beginning the fill

That grey puff coming out of the tip of the filling hose is actually liquid helium. Strangely, as we were working around the telescope as it was off-gassing lots and lots of helium, we could breathe in deeply near the vent hose (warmer, gaseous helium) and our voices would get high – just like sucking on a party balloon.

The exhaust hose gets so cold that it actually condenses gas from the air into liquid. That’s liquid nitrogen and oxygen (and a blend of others) dripping off the hose.

A quick trip up to the roof just to check things out on a nice day. This is a look inside the groundshield, at the moveable top of the telescope.

2012-11-27
The South Pole’s Campbell–Stokes Sunshine Recorder

High up on the roof of the incredibly sophisticated Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, there exists an extremely low-tech piece of equipment: The Campbell-Stokes Sunshine Recorder. Photos.

From Wikipedia:

The Campbell–Stokes recorder (sometimes called a Stokes sphere) is a kind of sunshine recorder. It was invented by John Francis Campbell in 1853 and modified in 1879 by Sir George Gabriel Stokes. The original design by Campbell consisted of a glass sphere set into a wooden bowl with the sun burning a trace on the bowl. Stokes’s refinement was to make the housing out of metal and to have a card holder set behind the sphere.

The unit is designed to record the hours of bright sunshine which will burn a hole through the card.

This basic unit is still in use today with very little change. It is widely used outside the United States, where the Marvin sunshine recorder is generally the instrument used by the National Weather Service.

A few photos of the unit currently recording sunshine at the South Pole:

https://flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/8229074686/in/set-72157632128663488/lightbox/

2012-11-25
Touring the Bicep2 Microwave Telescope with Physicist Jonathan Kaufman

South Pole is home to many, many world-class science experiments, laboratories, and telescopes. One such telescope is the Bicep2 Microwave Telescope. On the ice this year working on the hardware and software is Physicist Jonathan Kaufman. Yesterday, Jon was nice enough to give me a quick tour of the telescope and lab, as well as an opportunity to see them send the liquid helium dewier off to the Cryogenics Lab for a refill. Here’s video of Jon giving a tour, and photos of the dewier.

About Bicep2, from Caltech:

The primary goal of BICEP2 is to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is a nearly perfect, uniform black body at 2.7 K, with degree-scale temperature anisotropy of about 0.1 mK and polarization on the order of microkelvin. This radiation was emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang, at the time of recombination, when the Universe first became transparent to light. The temperature anisotropy and polarization of the CMB are some of the most powerful ways of understanding the early Universe. Cosmologists believe the Universe experienced a rapid period of cosmic inflation during its first fraction of a second, exponentially expanding from a dense, hot subatomic volume. Many models of inflation predict that this rapid acceleration would have generated gravitational waves that would remain energetic enough 380,000 years later to leave an imprint on the CMB. BICEP2 is searching for this imprint by measuring the pure-curl component of the CMB polarization on degree angular scales, which is largely free of contamination from sources other than primordial gravitational waves.

More on Bicep, Bicep2, and Keck from Christopher Sheehy. (PDF Link)

Snowmobiling out to the Bicep2 Telescope’s Lab, which also shares space with the South Pole Telescope.

Liquid Helium dewier, and Jon

Looking off the roof of the Bicep2 across to the SPT

Lowering the dewier
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/8205021288/lightbox/

Bicep2

2012-11-23
My First Sundog

This past week, while I was hanging out with Utility Technician Charles “Chuckles” Letourneau, I saw my first Antarctic Sundog, or “Parhelion”.

A quick description of this spectacularly beautiful atmospheric phenomenon from Wikipedia:

Sundogs are made commonly of plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or, during very cold weather, by ice crystals called diamond dust drifting in the air at low levels. These crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. If the crystals are randomly oriented, a complete ring around the sun is seen — a halo. But often, as the crystals sink through the air they become vertically aligned, so sunlight is refracted horizontally — in this case, sundogs are seen.

As the sun rises higher, the rays passing through the crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane. Their angle of deviation increases and the sundogs move further from the sun.[4] However, they always stay at the same elevation as the sun.

Sundogs are red-colored at the side nearest the sun. Farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. However, the colors overlap considerably and so are muted, never pure or saturated. The colors of the sundog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).

It is theoretically possible to predict the forms of sundogs as would be seen on other planets and moons. Mars might have sundogs formed by both water-ice and CO2-ice. On the giant gas planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — other crystals form the clouds of ammonia, methane, and other substances that can produce halos with four or more sundogs.[5]

2012-11-22
Launching a Meteorological Balloon with South Pole Meteorologist Phillip Marzette

The weather here at the South Pole is intense – one day it’s crazy storms, the next day it’s sunny and nice – and it’s always cold. Detailed weather observation and reporting happens daily here, and the man in charge of it all is Meterologist Phillip Marzette.

The other day, Phil let me tag along and help him launch a weather balloon carrying Radiosonde 15 miles into the atmosphere. During its flight, the Radiosonde took continuous atmospheric and position measurements, and relayed them to us on the ground. Here’s the video of the setup and launch procedure.

2012-11-21