Antimatter Detector To Hitch Ride Into Space
A massive particle detector that will search the reaches of outer space for antimatter and other clues about the origins of the universe began the initial steps towards its voyage to the International Space Station on Wednesday.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) loaded the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer onto a giant C5 Galaxy U.S. Air Force transport plane at the Geneva airport, which will take off Thursday for Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"The AMS left the research center on Tuesday and was loaded onto an aircraft specially sent by the US air force on Wednesday," said CERN spokesman James Gillies during an interview with the AFP news agency.
Although military planes are typically used to transport tanks and helicopters around the world, CERN sought assistance from the U.S. Air Force when they learned that the AMS would not fit into a 747 jumbo jet.
The giant detector will catch the last scheduled U.S shuttle flight into space, and is expected to reach the International Space Station towards the end of February 2011, Gillies said.
The AMS will provide information to augment data obtained by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest atom smasher, which has sought to solve some of the mysteries behind the creation of the universe.
The AMS detector’s main objective is to search for dark matter and antimatter, two of the unsolved missing links in understanding the origins of the universe and life on earth.
The detector must “find where antimatter came from", by searching for stars in distant galaxies that scientists believe to consist entirely of antimatter, Gillies explained.
One of the theoretical laws of physics states that for every type of ordinary particle, or matter, there exists a corresponding antiparticle.Â
Scientists hypothesize that matter and anti-matter, which obliterate each other on contact and release energy, must have been made in equal amounts by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
However, the universe that emerged consists overwhelmingly of matter.
Scientists hope the AMS will find clues to what happened to the anti-matter, and whether other places consisting almost entirely anti-matter exist on the edges of the known universe — a mirror image of it and everything in it, including life.
"If there is an anti-universe, perhaps out there beyond the edge of our universe, our space-based detector may well be able to bring us signs of its existence," said Samuel Ting, the principal investigator for the project, which involves hundreds of international scientists and technicians.
"The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory,” said the 73-year old Nobel laureate and MIT professor during a news conference.
The AMS project is being funded by 16 nations, including China, the United States and many European countries.
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Image Caption: A computer generated image showing AMS-02 mounted to the ISS S3 Upper Inboard Payload Attach Site. Credit: NASA/JSC
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