The last of the drilling crew left last week. Drilling operations have ceased for the season and the drill camp has been moved to the winter storage site where it will resume life in November of this year. IceCube personnel number 17 including our 3 winterover operators. The holes are now covered and the newly-deployed IceTop tanks closed. All but two of the new IceCube strings are now powered up and running. High level commissioning has taken 1278 flasher runs with the TestDAQ. AMANDA TWR and pDAQ activities continue at a hectic but productive pace. The last group of IceCubers — the DAQ team — will participate in a "soft close" to extend time at Pole for continued work on DAQ.
It's getting kind of chilly.
During the last 2 week the drill camp has been in the process of moving to the winter storage site in the dark sector. The final trenches were backfilled on 2/7. All IceTop tanks have been closed. The closing took approximately 3 days. All IceTop DOMs have been turned on and are communicating. The noise rates were extremely high immediately following closing but have settled down in the days since and continue their downward trend.
There are 1,424 deployed DOMs (InIce and IceTop). Five DOMs do not communicate from last year, and one DOM communicates but does not work. Only one DOM does not communicate from this season. Of the total, 1,417 DOMs or 99.5 % are working. Some new DOMs exhibit high current, though it is hoped that these high currents will go away on their own, as has happened. Before strings are integrated into the data acquisition system (DAQ), those DOMs still in water are moved to an auxiliary hub. Currently, DOM 51 on string 58, and DOM 60 on string 74 and a few DOMs at the bottom of string 56 are still in water. Testing continues on all strings including AMANDA. IceCube and AMANDA see the same signals from the standard candle. Still on the list of things to do prior to departure (possibly as late as 2/24) is integration of the IceTop array. This will commence once the stability issues have been resolved. The DAQ integration efforts are showing promising signs. Both the software and hardware synchronization signals are being received and processed by pDAQ.
We will have to wait and see how the initial data taking goes.