Friday 21st February 2014

This morning when I woke up the ANARESAT had gone off air. There must have been a power outage last night that caused the antenna auto tracking to disengage and the satellite has drifted out of view. It took me a while to drive the huge antenna back until the satellite was within view, and then I could engage the auto tracking to do its search before locking onto the satellite. The satellite we use is only fifteen degrees above our horizon and situated over the equator.

ARPANSA went well today using the main gamma ray detector. At eleven thirty I had another job interview which went pretty well and I might have to do another one next week also. I took some time out to polish up all the bullet casings I have found over the year and then late in the afternoon I worked on my blog to bring it up to date. We were told today we have to start conserving power by shutting down all non essential systems. They are even talking about shutting down the ARPANSA laboratory for the whole year but at the moment it’s all talk and it depends how much fuel they can fly in for next year’s crew. 

Personally I think we need to plan this wisely as turning of all the lights and heaters while we are running on wind power will achieve nothing and only increase the pissoff factor. Even if we manage to save one drum of fuel in the next eight weeks what good is that out of 400,000 litres?

For dinner we had Indian and later I watched a few documentaries with Luc.

So far I have found over sixty bullet casings and projectiles including two 1960 flares, 12 gauge, 303, 30.30, 38 cal and 22 cal