[pdoconnell]

I used to work at UW Space Science and Engineering Center, which did lots of remote support for the projects down on the ice. We would often be communicating with IceCube to plan shipments, or get machines that touched each other working. This was one of the most interesting systems support you can think of.

The hardest part of the support was system updates. There wasn't even a local yum cache on the continent, and many of these machines had security standards they had to meet involving staying patched. Once I managed to start a batch-update job over SSH, and within 15 minutes I had the team lead run into my office to see if I was doing anything, because he received a call saying we were saturating the bandwidth to the continent.

I never even considered applying for the jobs down on the ice, because I would never PQ. Even migraines can be too much, because if you're going down they need you ready to work EVERY day you're down there. Transient medical issues happen, but chronic without any control, or requiring medicine for survival, immediately disqualifies you. My friend who just hit McMurdo this week had to have dental work done to qualify.

All that being said, Barnett and the rest of the Ice Cube team do some amazing work with extremely difficult technical problems to solve. It is the same level of difficulty as anything in space, and they have done remarkably.

[themodelplumber]

Very interesting. What does PQ mean? Pass qualification?

[pdoconnell]

Physically qualify I believe, but either really works. Everyone would just grumble about all the health visits they would have to do in September and October to be ready.