The Second Generation Kunlun Automated Weather Station
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- Category: Working
- Published on Thursday, 05 February 2015 05:20
- Written by Super User
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We built a new automated weather station called "The Second Generation Kunlun Automated Weather Station (KLAWS-2G)" in 2014. It is a 15 meter tall mast with 10 temperature sensors, 7 anemometers, 1 barometer and 1 humidity sensor. The main goal to build such an instrument is to monitoring the long-term astronomical site condition at Dome A.
It is always very difficult to make electronic devices which are exposed in an extremely cold environment, moreover without any manned-maintenance. Unfortunately, this is true at Dome A. The original AWS built in 2011 had fallen down after working for about 9 months. Therefore, we carefully make and test our new AWS. Firstly, we built a prototype AWS and test it in Mohe last winter. The sensors we bought could work when the temperature is at least as low as -45°C. Then, we bought all the sensors (the sensors are very expensive, e.g. 12670 RMB per anemometer, we must test it first), made cables and integrated the data acquiring models. We test all the parts of KLAWS-2G at Xinglong for a month. Finally, we did low temperature experiment in Nanjing. With help of our active heating system, the electronics could work when the ambient temperature was -80°C.
We sent KLAWS-2G to Shanghai for shipping it to Antarctica by Xuelong in October 2014. On Jan 12th 2015, our colleagues who participated the 31rd Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition Team had installed it successfully at Dome A (the rightmost mast in above photo). Soon, the data grabbing programming started, and sent the data back in every 15 minutes. After the expedition team left on Jan 23rd 2015, KLAWS-2G worked finely without any problems (excepted the heating system seems not to be working, but I am not worried about it. This is because when I did low temperature in Nanjing I found the electronics could start when the temperature was -45°C and the temperature in the electronic box could be kept about 40°C higher than outside temperature by only the heat emitting by the devices in the electronic box). All the data from KLAWS-2G are illustrated here.
I would like to thank my colleagues help me making, testing and installing KLAWS-2G. Wish it works for many years!
Testing AST3-II in Mohe
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- Category: Working
- Published on Friday, 24 January 2014 06:07
- Written by Super User
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Because the 30rd Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition Team went to a new site 520km away from Zhongshan Station to build a new station called Taishan instead of exploring Kunlun Station in Dome A this year, the second AST3 was shipped to Mohe in Heilongjiang Province, where is the northernmost place of China, for low temperature testing.
The telescope arrived in the middle of November in 2013, and was placed in a village near Heilongjiang River — the border between China and Russia. It was assembled soon by the people from NIAOT and then wait for the camera. Meanwhile, the CCD camera arrived in the end of November in 2013 from STA company in the USA. After some short-term low temperature examination in our group lab, one of my colleague and me took the camera to Mohe on 2nd December in 2013. After a few days of assembling and debugging, the telescope start working. So far, the telescope was still running smoothly in a moderate cold ambience, at least from my perspective. I am in charge of building computers and associated devices for operating telescope, grabbing images, storing and reducing data. I am also writing codes to implement these functionalities except for the data reduction pipeline part. All of these devices ran without any problems even when the operating room's temperature went down below -10°C in the midnight. The softwares also ran happily, though I had fixed some minor bugs.
However, the observation condition there was always horrible. Because of closed to the river and surrounding by forrest, the humidity was very high. We always found the air was filled with tiny ice crystals in the night. This factor degraded image qualities. Even such an average FWHM of stars on the image merely less than 4″ was a good "seeing" there. Even worse, the cooler of the CCD did not work correctly. The temperature of the CCD was just in the same level of the environment's. It caused the "dark current" relative high. Therefore, the detected magnitude was very shallow, many faint source could not be revealed in such conditions.
In order to monitor weather condition in Dome A, we planned to build a new automated weather station(AWS) instead of the fallen one. I took a mini AWS to Mohe, too. It had a propeller anemometer, a barometer, a relative humidity/temperature sensor and three temperature sensors. These sensors also worked correctly.
We also made several pages to show the real-time equipments status and the weather data. Click here to view these images and plots.