Pastornicky has batted .200 with one home run and a .321 on-base percentage in 28 games for the Braves this season. His 2013 season was cut short by surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

Gosselin was hitting .344 in 96 games for Gwinnett this season. He had two hits in six at-bats for the Braves last season in his first major-league action.“Anything we get, we squeeze every bit of life out of it,” said Paul Sheppard, a retired Air Force colonel who is the deputy head of Antarctic logistics for the National Science Foundation. “The taxpayers get a tremendous return on investment.”

The United States’ ownership of this prime scientific asset is, in part, a relic of the Cold War. The adversary then was the Soviet Union, and the two nations competed to project influence all over the globe and far into space.

That competition — which took American astronauts to the moon in 1969 — was also a big reason that American flags were ultimately hoisted over the best piece of dry land in Antarctica, on which McMurdo Station sits, and over the most symbolic spot on the continent, the