Hey All,
Challenger is making quick work of this last stretch before recovery on the shores of Ascension Island.
With less than 260 km remaining between our brave little glider and the end zone, we could potentially make it to shore within 10 days with our average speed being around 26 km/day. However, we do have some battery left and the potential to do some creative sampling around this little oasis in the middle of the Southern Atlantic.
This will be a topic of discussion in class today, but so far Antonio has proposed two branches of ideas: to circumnavigate the island to study the wake created by the island being in the path of the flow of the gyre, or ahead of us is a region called the Ascension Fracture which is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge- the topic of study here would be to look into the oscillations we saw with Silbo crossing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge some months ago in the north.
And the third option which could also be incredibly valuable to our cause would be hiring someone to go out and recover for us sooner rather than later- when Scott and Chip arrive in Ascension there will be a number of tasks to get done on a very limited time frame and if there is less than ideal weather, that could make things much more difficult. However, if we were to recover now that gives us a much larger window to find out what needs to be fixed on the glider, what needs to be in Ascension for the operation to be successful, and more time to get the glider in the water just in case the weather is stormy upon our teams arrival.
We will update later today on what is discussed during class
Force Wind Sea & Honor