I had a lot of new experiences and learned a lot along the way! This voyage will be much longer. It will be 60 days long, and we will go much further South than we did in May. As you follow this journey through our virtual exchange, you can also visit https://mnf.csiro.au/en to see live footage from the ship’s deck! Just click the play button on the video below the heading “Where is RV Investigator now?”.
My job on the ship is to monitor the instruments on the boat to make sure that everything is working. I also help with changing filters on some instruments and processing some seawater samples, but I will explain more about that in future articles. One of my favorite tasks is doing weather balloon launches. We fill the balloons with helium and tie a sensor onto the balloon. The sensor measures temperature, pressure, and humidity. We then walk out onto the deck and let the weather balloon and sensor go. As the balloon rises, it sends back measurements from different heights.
Currently, we are making the final plans for the voyage, like shipping all the equipment we will need to Tasmania and making sure that all the instruments we will use are working. We will be flying out to Tasmania on Christmas day because it takes two days to get to Hobart from Salt Lake City with the change in time zones and travel time. Can you trace this journey on a map or globe? It's a LONG way. We fly from Salt Lake to Los Angeles to Sydney to Hobart (the flight between Los Angeles and Sydney is 15 hours long!). We then have two days to load all our supplies on the ship—this is called “mobilization.” Then, we will all move onto the ship and quarantine for four days to make sure everyone is healthy before we head out to sea!
