Planning scientific equipment for Antarctic conditions

Working in a system where people say: "STS has a low temperature environmental chamber which is used by STS staff for equipment development and testing down to −85 Celsius. It may be possible for you to use this chamber to temperature test your own equipment" is what science is about, we have learned from our mistakes, can we help you to not do the same.

The reference to XLR connectors, an aged technology, shows the ruggedness of the the design, a good example of the evolution of survival of the fittest in design. It is not the best, but the most fit.

Battery systems aren't designed for temperatures below -40°C.

I'm currently looking at building a cold weather tower for use as a non-rotator SatNOGS ground station.

One solution I've found is using snow as an insulator. If you insulate a battery box then cover it in one foot of snow you can effectively insulate batteries against cold temperatures.

Tests I've conducted with temperature sensors: -34°C air temperature. -24°C under 2" of snow. -17°C under one foot of snow. That's without heating.

If you use a heater and an alternative energy source, you can keep the batteries warm and toasty within their optimal operational specification of 0°C to 20°C.

I'm in the Canadian arctic and seasonal winter temperatures are between -35°C and -44°C.

I'm also looking at using SkelCaps from Skeleton Technologies out of Estonia. I haven't tested them yet, but I suspect their curved graphene ultra capacitors should do quite well in the extreme cold.

I did robotics research in Antarctica. The key challenge I encountered was designing an appropriate interface for interacting with a robot in that environment. Coding was completely impossible when it was -25 or -40 out, but we still needed a minimal interface for interacting with a semi-autonomous robot, and few off the shelf solutions worked well, so we basically ended up with ruggedized laptops and minimal interaction.

I haven't been to Antarctica but have done a lot of cold weather hiking (mostly in Iceland) with various electronic equipment.

One tip relevant to this article that you can use to increase the performance of battery powered electronic equipment by keeping it heated.

Of course you're not going to bring along dedicated heating equipment, but you yourself function as a portable heat generator.

So e.g. if you need to carry a radio you can arrange your clothing so it's strapped to your chest with the battery facing your body, with all your clothing going over the radio, and a hands-free headset on a wire going up to your neck to use the radio.

My father did two winter tours with ANARE, at Casey and Davis, as the base communications technician. What I gleaned is this: if the diesel ever freezes, you are buggered.

To me the idea of being stranded in a sunless chillvoid for months on end seems like a prelude to actual hell. But he loved it. He truly loved it.

This is interesting but I don't know how practical it is.

The key takeaway is...

> The single most important thing is to test your equipment before taking it to Antarctica. This is obvious, but many people don't do it and their research programs are compromised by equipment failures which are completely avoidable. [....] Make sure that your equipment works correctly at the temperatures you will encounter in Antarctica.

But no advice is given on where to find a test environment that can simulate:

> Temperatures may occasionally go below −80 Celsius in far inland regions.

> The wind can blow up to 200 km/h in coastal regions, and it will carry grit in areas where there is no snow cover.

> Antarctica has very dry air which results in large amounts of static electricity, particularly when the wind is strong. Static electricity can instantly destroy unprotected electronic equipment.

Tangentially-related: Wendover's video on Antarctica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s3j-ptJD10