Roquetes (Baix Ebre), Monday 13th of January, 2014. -- After 17 years and 18 uninterrupted campaigns, the Ebro Observatory will send a technician to conduct scientific activities in Antarctica .
The main objective of the presence of the Ebro Observatory (OE) in the Spanish Antarctic Base (BAE) is to ensure the continuous record of the Earth's magnetic field and ionospheric activity during the next austral summer, with instruments that were installed on Livingston Island in the 1995-1996 and 2004-2005 campaigns respectively, and which have remained operational until today.
The project within which these activities are performed should have ended on the 31st of December of 2013. In fact, it has already met its objectives. However, the scientific activity related to the project needs to be continue during 2014. Due to the lack of a call for Complementary Actions of Research and the delay in the announcement of the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation, the project was extended one more year in order to maintain and extend the observational series at the BAE and to conduct dissemination activities of results related to the current campaign.
Thus, Miguel Ibáñez Caballé will travel to the BAE to retrieve records from the winter 2013 and to maintain and calibrate instrumentation of the geophysical observatory. In addition, during this campaign, he will determine the best location to install, in a future campaign, a new instrument that will fully automate the geomagnetic measurements. Installation of this instrument is subject to the granting of a new project recently requested.
Some of these tasks are coordinated with scientists of the Engineering School of La Salle (Ramon Llull University ) and of the Astronomy and Geomatics (gAGE) group of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
