Meat Loaf's song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" perfectly sums up the first few days of our glider deployment.
At 4:40 a.m. on Saturday, about 24 hours after the deployment, my phone blasted the text tone I assigned to the gliders. One of them had aborted its mission and needed pilot attention. I had chosen the most obnoxious tone I could find to ensure that I would wake up.
I stumbled out of bed and made my way to my computer to investigate. The leak sensor in the glider’s tail fin was triggered. My heart sank. Of all the reasons for an abort we could have, that one was bad. If the fin was leaking, it would eventually stop working, meaning that we could no longer steer the glider.
After some digging into sensor readings from earlier in the day and a phone call with the glider manufacturer, we determined that we probably had a bad sensor. The fin was most likely fine.
However, while digging, we uncovered a more serious problem. Almost since the glider was deployed the previous day, it had been constantly resetting itself, so it wasn’t diving or moving anywhere. This was an uncommon issue and one we couldn’t fix while the glider was deployed. Luckily, the ship was still close by and was able to turn back and retrieve it on its way to a field station farther down the Antarctic Peninsula.
That’s where the glider is now: on the ship at the field station. Two members of our team have been working diligently to troubleshoot the issue. We hope we can still deploy it before the ship returns to Chile. We’re not sure what the problem is yet, but we still have a few days to figure it out.
Stay tuned! And keep your fingers crossed!
