Space Station Becomes Dark Matter Hunter 40
CWmike writes "With a new $2 billion device successfully installed Thursday, the International Space Station has become a dark matter hunter. Two robotic arms worked in tandem to lift the 15,251-pound instrument, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, out of space shuttle Endeavour's payload bay and then attached it to the backbone of the space station. The instrument will orbit the Earth, sifting through cosmic particles and providing data that it is hoped will help find the answers to fundamental questions of physics related to antimatter and dark matter."
Great! (Score:2)
A new reality show: Aldebaron: Dark Matter Hunter.
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Isn't that expensive? (Score:2)
I know we have done dark matter tests in deep mines, and we also test with super colliders. But this is just a box that sits there right? What's the advantage of this over one in a mine that justifies the cost, which I'm sure is much more than an earth based solution. It seems to me that dark matter, which doesn't directly interact with matter anyways, would be more suitable in the deep mines away from space/solar radiation, not sitting directly out in it.
Re:Isn't that expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
The original plans called for a cryogenic magnet. It is interesting to note that they have gotten to the point where the system estimated lifetime would be 3 years, but swapped it for a permanent magnet version in the end.
I imagine this was quite challenging as loss of cooling/superconductivity would result in an explosion - not a good thing to have. And that loss can simply result from a high-energy cosmic ray striking a tiny superconducting wire. Somehow they found a way around this..
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I imagine this was quite challenging as loss of cooling/superconductivity would result in an explosion
Sounds rather like this [imdb.com].
THink of it this way (Score:3)
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Re:Isn't that expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
What's the advantage of this over one in a mine that justifies the cost
Primary cosmic rays are much simpler animals than secondary cosmic rays. Primary cosmic rays are almost 100% protons, which almost never reach the surface of the Earth because they interact with the atmosphere and create cosmic ray "showers" that are rich and complex, full of muons and gamma rays and prolific in neutron production as well. Even fairly deep underground dealing with these backgrounds is a complicated process.
Having only primary cosmic rays to deal with makes life somewhat easier. There may also be dark matter signals that are too low energy to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere--that is, weak signals in the low-energy cosmic ray background due to dark matter collisions or decays integrated over a very large volume.
The ideal place to do this kind of work is on the Moon: because it has no atmosphere, pions produced by cosmic ray protons will come to a halt before they decay, so there are only low-energy muons produced. Thus, a couple of metres of rock on the Moon will give you shielding as good as a much thicker layer on Earth.
budget? we don't need no stinkin' budget! (Score:3)
From the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
In 1999, after the successful flight of AMS-01, the total cost of the AMS program was estimated to be $33 million, with AMS-02 planned for flight to the ISS in 2003. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and after a number of technical difficulties with the construction of AMS-02, the cost of the program ballooned to an estimated $1.5 billion.
So... the cost ballooned from $33 million to $1.5 billion? That has to be one of the biggest cost overruns in history. Not to say that it won't perform valuable observations; I just find it amazing that initial estimates were so wildly off, and yet it still got built and launched.
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Moron (Score:3)
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lol. retard alert.
how exactly do you expect to "harness the power of dark matter"?
So, what is it about dark matter that makes it so it can't be harnessed? :) I'm being facetious somewhat, since we don't know what dark matter is, and can only see the massive effects of it in a macro view of space.
However, he might mean that if dark matter is made up of particular particles, then we can 'collect or create' those particles into an array so as to create gravity in space, for one. Propulsion in our atmosphere for another. Really, there is a ton of things we could do if we found it and knew h
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15,251 (Score:2)
That's how much it weighed in space?!?
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"... a new $2 billion device ... Two robotic arms worked in tandem to lift the 15,251-pound instrument,"
They're delivering science and wall-street news all at once. Translation:
New Space Station attachment deployed.
Also, the US dollar has attained an all-time low of 131138.94 to one vs the British pound.
You should know that both NASA and the US Military use SI units; The only ones left using the crappy empirical units are the general public...
FTWA [wikipedia.org]
The [SI] system has been nearly globally adopted. Three principal exceptions are Myanmar (Burma), Liberia, and the United States.
This is clearly a ploy to oppress the common folk with antiquated and difficult to use measures.
Hunter??? (Score:2)
It's not a $2 Billion device (Score:2)
Costs pinches be damned on this one (Score:2)
The only device that can see raw cosmic rays (Score:2)
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Why ISS? (Score:2)
Just out of curiousity, is there a good reason that this is perched on the International Space Station rather than just being it's own satellite? Does it need maintenance or something like that?
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I haven't read the engineering summary on the AMS-02, but off the top of my head, there are many benefits of having it on the ISS:
1) Crew access to it in case anything goes wrong (i.e. for repairs or modifications)
Crew continually rotate through the ISS and could potentially go on a spacewalk to investigate / repair anything mechanically wrong with the module. If it were on a different orbital plane, we won't have a crew vehicle (read: space shuttle) capable of getting to it now that the space shuttle i
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Just out of curiousity, is there a good reason that this is perched on the International Space Station rather than just being it's own satellite? Does it need maintenance or something like that?
Future expansion is assured with a Space Station.