Eureka! Vanco Arctic Survey delivers first live Arctic video

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 03 November 2007 07:42

Science - Climate

Fortunately for the explorers the wolves proved true to form and after a 15-minute stand-off “evaporated into the Arctic night”.

The ground penetrating radar, dubbed Sprite, will be able to differentiate between snow and ice layers, which satellites and submarines are unable to do. The computer connected to Sprite will produce a daily summary of the results showing the thickness of the ice traversed that day.

The radar has been designed by Cambridge-based scientist Michael Gorman and is being tested for the first time in Arctic conditions at Eureka. Gorman said: "All the different parts of the Sprite are working well independently..[and] have been tested outside but never on ice....This is a nail-biting time as we wait to see how the radar performs when out in Arctic conditions."

Data from Sprite is processed and fed to the Iridium link using a Linux-based system mounted on a sledge. Its main functions are to archive data onto non-volatile storage, to read data cards from the cameras and bio-data sources, to handle compressed web-cam images in real-time and to feed data files to the six Iridium modems. It is reported to do all this on a power consumption of just two watts.