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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 Antarctic…
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 interac…