Asbestos
My first time in Australia was a few years ago. I went to help install computing hardware at the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales. A bunch of us from the Breakthrough Listen team (me, Danny, Dave, and Claire) gathered in Sydney. Danny was already in the country and met us at the airport with a rental car along with some bad news.
Turns out while the rest of us were flying for 14 hours over the Pacific some chunk of unindentified material was discovered in the air conditioning ducts while a crew was cleaning the tower. Australia takes asbestos mitigation and removal very seriously, and this foreign substance needed to be identified as safe before anybody could enter the building. So the upshot was despite flying all this way (and then driving six hours to the town of Parkes) we were unable to get inside the telescope server room to do planned work.
Still, we finished the trek to Parkes under the assumption we would eventually get access during our week. To occupy our time while waiting for the pertinent government agency to handle this potentially hazardous environmental situation, we had safety orientation and training how to operate the telescope. We were set up in a spare office inside the lab. Outside our window the locked-down telescope tower stood about 100 meters away. So close and yet so far!
At least we did have this lab space to boot up the new server and get it configured, right? Well, turns out there's another Parkes in Australia (near Canberra) and the server was mailed there by mistake. The shipper corrected this error, but still... the big box arrived a day or two late.
We kept busy - software development and meetings about observational strategies during the day, trying out different bars/restaurants in town at night. I also stalked a family of kangaroos that frequented a field across the street from the hotel. As well, Breakthrough Listen was fully operational at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virgina, so being in this time zone was advantageous - I could manage the unfavorable shifts so that my colleagues in Berkeley could sleep.
One of the main Parkes technicians, Brett, felt bad for us, and as a special treat he took us for rides in his ultra-light plane. It was a two-seater, so we took turns getting our own private 20 minute tours from 4000 feet above Parkes. I went first, and as a reward for my bravery I enjoyed an extra 10 minutes of swooping over some mines on the edge of town. That was my only time in such an aircraft, and Brett was a trustworthy, diligent pilot. The plane was quite light; If I leaned forward it would immediately began to dip and descend. And so I would lean right back.
I enjoyed the comradery, the culture, and the kangaroos during most of the visit. I also, during the early part of the trip, got a chance to meet up a couple times with a friend who lived in the region. And Thursday night was a jam session as me, Danny, Dave, and Brett all play guitar. Still, on the final day at the telescope facility, the general mood of the team grew quite bleak. No word from the authorities about test results and thus we remained unable to access the tower.
Over our final lunch at the visitor's center we considered leaving early to take a scenic route back to Sydney before our flights home. In the afternoon we began packing up all our laptops and leaving copious notes for the staff about what to do with our servers after we're gone. One of the main researchers managing the telescope, Mal, came crashing into our office. He had an update: the substance has been identified as non-hazardous. So the tower has been cleared for entry! It was 3:30pm, i.e. 90 minutes before the small telescope staff were to go home for the weekend.
We snapped into action - time was short, but having basically prepped for this moment the past four days we made the most of it. Brett and Mal cancelled their personal Friday night plans to help us out. The server was quickly hauled up two stories and into the main server room (right below the top where the dish sits). We racked and cabled it up, got the netboot environment working, wired up the switch until packets flowed, and ensured data were successfully written to disk. Huzzah!
So the week wasn't a total bust after all. Phew. And I returned for a couple very productive trips since then wherein I installed more hardware, improved data collection capabilities, and hung out with many new kangaroo friends.