We arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, last Friday (06/09) seeing dolphins, sea turtles, and sharks on our way in. The first cruise has ended and the crew and I have spent the last few days demobilizing the ship and removing all the science gear. It will likely be taken to a new port to board a new vessel. The best part was that we arrived just in time for the SpaceX launch! So on Monday morning at 3:10AM, most of the crew climbed to the highest part of the ship to get the best view possible of the launch. It only lasted about 5 minutes, but it was something I will never forget.
We will be in Cape Canaveral until 06/17, completing maintance, conducting land surveys, and loading the new science gear for the next job. Our big task as marine technicians was to perform a gravity tie and land tie survey, these are done to calibrate our gravimeter. Aboard the R/V Langseth we have a BGM Gravimeter, that measures the gravity in mGal. This instrument must be recalibrated everytime we arrive to a new port to account for machine bias, this entails going to a known survey site on land to re-measure the Gravity, then comparing it to our ship’s gravimeter to reduce the bias. This in-and-of-itseft proved to be the most trying job yet, as all the sites were closed off behing highly restricted areas (one survey site was on Space Force land). It took us 5 days to access a site, only after acquiring permission from the Port Authority.
Our next step is to meet the oncoming scientists from Scripps to onbard their equiptment for the next cruise. We will be traveling down to around the Cayman Islands to retrieve sensors placed 6 months previously.
