For most of us, updating our software requires merely tapping on the app store and watching a progress bar track across the screen for a few seconds. For George Dransfield, however, it wasn’t so easy.
Last summer she had to board a plane, fly to Hobart in Australia, then after a spell in quarantine, take another plane to Wilkins Aerodrome on the coast of Antarctica. After a bus ride to Casey Station and one final flight on board a tiny Basler turboprop, she arrived at her final destination: Concordia Station, which sits 680 miles inland. She came armed with a couple of portable hard drives and a laptop, with seven weeks to perform some critical software maintenance.
Dransfield isn’t an Antarctic explorer but an astronomer. And her mission was to update the software that processes data collected by the most remote space telescope on Earth. The epic journey was essential because the station lacked anything resembling decent internet connectivity. And this is a problem when images taken by the telescope, known as A-STEP, are 4,096 x 4,096 pixels each.
“We spend the time taking images of the sky, and each image is about 150 megabytes,” explained Dransfield. “Like most telescopes, you download the raw images to your computer after a night of
