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AMS-02 Roma Group
An artist's conception shows the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the left, installed on one of the International Space Station's truss sections. The device is to be brought up on the shuttle Endeavour.
Big particle-physics experiments have caused their share of unwarranted nightmares over the past few years, including the worries about globe-gobbling black holes and strangelets that might be created by Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle detector due to go into orbit on the shuttle Endeavour, just might actually detect strangelets, or the traces of mysterious dark matter, or bits of antimatter that couldn't possibly be created on Earth.
But Samuel Ting, the Nobel-winning MIT physicist who has guided the spectrometer through a troubled 17-year-long development effort, will actually be sleeping a lot easier once the AMS is launched.
"Our only nightmare for AMS during the 17 years was to be removed from the manifest," Ting, the experiment's principal investigator, told me today.
A few years ago, it looked as if NASA would be leaving the van-sized apparatus on the ground just because it couldn't spare a shuttle mission to fly it up to the International Space Station. Ting said he was surprised by that decision, particularly because scientists from 16 countries had contributed so much to the experiment. "I would say 'surprised' is the most polite word I can think of," he said.
Fortunately, Congress set aside the money for a flight to send up the AMS. And when NASA decided to extend operations on the space station to at least 2020, Ting and his team retrofitted the 7-ton, cryogenically cooled detector to make it last as long as the station, even if it stays in orbit until 2030.
Ting reiterated the main goals of the AMS experiment during a news briefing today:
- Look for heavy antimatter particles, such as the nuclei of antihelium or anticarbon, that would otherwise be annihilated as they passed through Earth's atmosphere. The presence of such cosmic particles could shed light on what happened to all the antimatter that should have been created along with ordinary matter in the big bang. "If you expect 20 antihelium and anticarbon [particles], and you never see one, something's wrong," Ting said.
- Watch for the traces left behind by exotic particles that may theoretically account for dark matter, which is thought to account for 90 percent of the matter in the universe but can only be detected by its gravitational effect.
- Keep an eye out for anomalous combinations of particles, such as strangelets, which incorporate an unusual type of "strange" quark.
To make such detections, the AMS will rely on the most powerful magnet launched into space and a complement of seven particle-detecting instruments. An early version of the device underwent real-world testing aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998, so Ting is confident that AMS-2 will work like a charm after its installation and a shakedown period of eight hours. Once it's installed, the astronauts on the station don't really need to do anything:The data will be beamed down to Earth for analysis — at first to a control center at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and eventually to CERN, Europe's particle physics research center. That's right, the same center that plays host to the Large Hadron Collider.
I suppose the only nightmare Ting has to worry about now is that, for some reason, the AMS doesn't work as planned. He doesn't sound all that worried ... but other physicists have questioned whether the $2 billion project will end up being worth it. In last week's issue of the journal Science, the University of Chicago's Dietrich Muller was quoted as saying that the scientific questions being addressed by the AMS could have been done much more cheaply using high-altitude balloon experiments. And the University of Michigan's Gregory Tarle contended that nuclei from antimatter galaxies would never make it to our corner of the cosmos anyway.
"The major justification for doing AMS has evaporated," Tarle said.
When a reporter brought up Tarle's criticism at the end of today's briefing, Ting dodged the criticism and instead talked about Tarle's university.
"University of Michigan is where I went to school," he observed. "Used to have a very good football team. In the last few years, the team has gone to pot. Last year, they have changed the coach.
"I have no other answer."
Professor Tarle, I think you just got Tinged.
More about the antimatter quest:
- It's official: Heaviest antimatter found
- Space mission hunts for antimatter galaxies
- Antimatter atoms captured at last
- AMS may lead to space radiation shield
Stay tuned for further updates from Kennedy Space Center, in Cosmic Log as well as in msnbc.com's space news section. You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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If anything is learned by particle detector, might have to apply it to neutralizing the contamination from Japan nuclear disaster and future nuclear plant meltdowns.
Uh, it's really not going to have anything to do with that...
Bring it on!, I prefer a good fight to all this congressional sneaking around....thankfully, someone had the foresight to get a big magnet up there....rather than speculate, let's see what the seven detectors find, I would hope that they are modular enough that they can be swapped out if yet an eighth type of detector is warrented....there is plenty of ambition for good space experiments, glad as HELL we at least have some part in it!!...imagine if it was china, on a chinese station, and the discovery is some new or proposed particle, confirmed, with special properties tested AND not disclosed in peer reviewed journals or free press or even on some obscure blog, but rather weaponized and used against whomever....farfeteched? maybe, china has, for the most part been benign (don't expect the dali lama to agree though...)...but here, we will disclose as much scientific information as possible, mitigating an element of surpise for one thing, and, for another, perhaps fostering the peaceful use (me, I am thinking space ship propulsion with heavy antimatter, but thats just conjecture, and untimely at best) of any discoveries. Imagine a world with out bardeen cooper et al....many of the readers would not know the implications....so let's make the supposition that some strangelet with peculiar properties is discovered, harnessed and utilized for, um, let's say energy production, cheap energy production...not saying that will happen, only making a supposition. If used properly, perhaps man steps beyond the solar system and mitigates a conflict on some aliens territory....whereas, an ignorant world, devoid of scientific achievement, sits on it's hands idly burning away the planets thermal blanket (oil) only to have a more advanced culture show up on it's solar system on day, not to mitigate, but to dictate....sure good for science fiction but the theme is found here and in the article, knowledge is strength. Bring it on!! we need more knowledge!!!...if nothing else than to keep us rank amatures from writing science fiction...how about save the shuttle to save the planet??
Scrubbed.
Not slamming on you Alan, but I already pointed out that the LHC is orders of magnitude too weak to create a hypothetical micro black hole or a strange object, even by the most liberal mathmatical equations for the Planck Limit. Most of the machine's power is used to create the toroidal magnetic field, and keep the helium at near absolute zero. Only a small fraction of the power even goes into propelling the protons/nuclei.
However, it could maybe, just maybe, do something else entirely unexpected. The odds are quite small though, so I won't bother to re-explain it. (I don't think they built it perfectly symmetrical enough for it to happen anyways)
Ok science fellas. I am wowed by your...stuff you're saying here. It's not my specialty for sure but this sounds awful tricky to me. Like are we sure we want to find antimatter? How close would you get to it? Would it suck you in? Could you ever contain it? How big? Are we sure we want to do this?
Think about that when you open your eyes the next time.
We're talking individual subatomic particles. We can already produce (at great inefficiency) that much. Get as close as you like, but don't touch, no 'sucking in,' it's antimatter, not black holes. Same stuff as you or me, but reversed charge and spin, basically.
If you've ever had a PET scan, you've been involved with antimatter already. 'PET' is Positron Emission Tomography,' and positrons are just antimatter electrons...
SStuart: Great questions! Please keep asking and reading. A few short answers for you now, though. For every "normal" subatomic particle - like the old familiar electron - there is an anti-particle. The anti-particle for the electron is the positron. We detect those in a common medical scanner - Positron Emission Tomography or PET scanner. So "finding" anti-matter, or at least anti-particles, is done all the time. Just as ordinary matter is made up of electrons, neutrons and protons bound together; anti-matter is made up of their anti-particles. We've actually made a little anti-hydrogen here on Earth. an anti-matter atom and an equivalent ordinary atom, if they come together, will convert all their mass to energy according to the well-known formula e=mc^2. That's all they do, though. a few annihilating anti-particles or even atoms don't produce much energy at all on our human-sized scale, and that's all we could ever expect to find in space. Not to worry, my friend.
Nice Answer! No insults, or talking down to the other person. Uncommon civility there. Keep up the good work.
Also, anti-matter has the same gravitational attraction as normal matter so it wouldn't be attractive like a large celestial body is unless it's the same amount of mass.W ith regards to containment, you need to use magnetic fields since solid matter will annihilate with anti-matter.
No, these are not great questions. In fact they're the dumbest I've seen all day. They show not just complete ignorance of science, but also of common curiosity. It's as if the writer gets his curiosity from the worst sci-fi shows/movies that are around. He can't understand what it means to detect something that already exists, and so he can't be helped.
Looks like AB-1981 took care of the civility you were talking about Sundiver. I guess belittling somebody makes him feel superior, although to the rest of us he is just ignorant.
There are no dumb questions, only stupid answers.
is this a dumb question...how does a magnetic field constain anti-matter if its made of the same stuff?
Because of the magnetic properties of the antimatter, that reacts just like the magnetic properties of regular matter.
A magnetic field is not made of matter or antimatter. It affects them both. It repels the antimatter, keeping it contained in a vacuum so it doesn't come in contact with matter.
NOT NICE AB !! Please try to remember that some otherwise intelligent people are just not educated in physics. I myself learned all that I know from reading/researching topics without being in,or tied to, a formal institution. Some of us just like varied science topics. I build trains for a living, could you handle drills, tapguns, electric/electronic instillations wthout "EFFING" things up??? Could you tell a design engineer what can and cannot work in a given build?? Please listen to your mother and learn to play nice.
Yeah, all my Alan Boyle credibility has been lost, ever since he published that article on the last supper. He doesn't care to really understand science if his mind cannot get past religion.
So, AB-1981, you must be the next incarnation of Albert Einstein, right?
Like Stephen said " Please try to remember that some otherwise intelligent people are just not educated in physics."
It's people like you that stifle others' curiosity, and make them not care about the answers anymore. I hope you're not a teacher for Christ sake.
Sigh...
"It is better to be ignorant than to be stupid, because ignorance can be fixed."
- Mark Twain
just think 200+ years ago humans thought the world was flat and 300 + years ago scientist were burnd as witches, we humans are not smart at all, we are all still learning.