” Snow—lots of it.”

Not in the region where this is all proposed. The big selling points include that precipitation and cloud cover are almost non-existent.

Daylight and nighttime occur Feb. 24 to April 15 (+/- 1 or 2 days) and August 25 to Oct 15, and 24 hours of nighttime from April 15 to August 25. But it’s winter, the staff is stuck (emergency flights only) and not many of them. It’s like frozen-mercury cold. There are mechanical motorized mount issues to deal with. If you have a heated building there are thermal expansion/contraction issues when you open the dome. Snow—lots of it. There are some problems that aren’t worth the money for the solution.

Damn, beaten to it by MichaelL!

Balloon-borne telescopes usually observe wavelenths that don’t pentrate the atmosphere very well – gamma rays, X-rays, infrared, etc. NASA has a Balloon Program Office – http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code820/ – which operates on a shoestring.

So Hollywood’s creativity well has run so dry that they have to start remaking their remakes? Well, it’s not unprecedented. There are now four versions of “Body Snatchers” out there.

- Jack

“Childs, we’re going out to give Blair the test. If he tries to make it back here and we’re not with him… burn him.” – MacReady

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/how-often-do-people-antarctica-have-sex

These people get more action than I have ever had…. sadly

PS: For those that haven’t heard – A remake of John Carpenter’s version is in “the works”.

*Darn Southern Ocean and her big loooong swells. The worst bit is the old hands told me it was the smoothest crossing anyone could remember.

Having astronomers work remotely is great but you need maintenance and support staff on site. Mechanical systems and everything else have a lot of problems at 40 below (and in Antarctica, even colder). However the most difficult problem is keeping the on-site staff sane, healthy, happy and productive.

Most remote work sites (Arctic, oil rigs, etc.) deal with the problem by flying the employees in and out on a regular basis. That implies that civilization is accessible and regular flights are possible. These are challenging in Antarctica. Also you need good food, regular contact with the outside world, and a system of keeping people busy. Finally, you pay a premium wage for their isolation and the risks they run simply by being there.

Now, if you were compare the costs and difficulties of running a lunar observatory to those of one in the Antarctic, that would be interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Having read the original story long before seeing either version, the latter one was the more faithful to the story.
The thing (pun intended, naturally, this is BA’s blog after all) about the first version was having James (Marshal Dillon) Arness as the ‘carrot creature’, as some called it.

J/P=?

In the 1970′s the Air Force had the same problem in reverse. The communications with the POGO tracking station in Thule Greenland were dismal. It was mostly short wave and microwave relay stations. Since a Clarke orbit style comm-sat by definition has to be at zero inclination (thus right on the horizon causing all sorts of atmospheric signal distortion), they had to do some out-of-the-box thinking. The project was called “Bent Pipe” and consisted of (at least) two satellites in highly inclined, highly eccentric orbits.

The inclination was somewhere around 80°, IIRC, and the the eccentricity put the perigee at a normal 100 miles or so, but the apogee at several thousand. The satellites would thus whip around the southern part of the globe very quickly, then lazily spend several hours over the northern hemisphere where they could keep both Thule and Sunnyvale in sight. With two satellites they both spent most of their time over the northern end of the orbit and communications would only be interrupted for the time it took to slew the antenna between them.

- Jack