The science setup on Bely is excellent. The Aerosol Shed was erected from prefabricated panels in April, on the end of several hundred meters of electrical cable at a location upwind of everything else.
In this picture (facing south) the meteo station is at lower left; the pylon, chapel, “old building”, and guest house are in the middle and upper; and the remediation clean-up effort is at the top of the picture. This is where hundreds of tons of scrap metal from old military installations is being gathered up and hauled away by barge.
Here’s a video clip from flying over the station:
The Aerosol Shed is way off the bottom left corner of this picture.
It stands in magnificent isolation, the dot on the horizon:
This is view out the door, back to the station
The “clean sector” of wind direction is at least 180 degrees.
Yuri Ivanovich, Alexey and I carry the Aethalometer through the swamp; put it on the shelf; and I plug it in.
Is that all? They say incredulously.
Yup, that’s all. It just works.
They look somehow – disappointed. This incredibly sophisticated state-of-the-art real-time super-sensitive MAGIC BOX … just plugs in and works? No incantations of setup and calibration? No arcana of alignment? No mumbling, no rituals?
No Sir. Out of the box, plug it in.
I play the master card of Russian racial-cultural prejudice.
“Over the years, we have developed this instrument with continuous improvements so that it can be shipped to remote locations; taken out of the box; and works automatically: in India, Africa, and even Arabia.”
That’s all they need to hear. If Magee Sci has developed the box so it can be unpacked by Africans or Arabs … then obviously it will work in the country that was first into space. Their hearts swell with pride at the comparison, and they immediately take ownership of the data.
I go back the following morning and download about 12 hours of data. The air is so clean, I must gather the data points into one-hour averages.
Roughly five nanograms. Exactly in the range of expectations … but until today, no-one had any idea.
Now we do.
