Wednesday, December 20, 2006

LDB

Long Duration Balloon, aka LDB, is a project also referred to as ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. They've already launched one, maybe two of these giant information-collecting balloons that are supposed to circumnavigate the continent.

Check out more information from the NSBF, National Scientific Balloon Facility. Or from the BLAST, aka Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope. If you can't tell we live for acronyms down here.

I got to make a trip out to Willy Field last week to clean the bathrooms. We like to call it a working boondoggle, since it gets us out of town. The launch site is fairly close to the airstrip, so I snapped the following photo. The bigger buildings on the right-hand side are where the balloons are stored. They were built on skis, so that they can be moved anywhere.
LDB site from willy field

Posted by Katie from the Ice @ 11:02 PM