As if spacewalking and zero gravity pooping aren't exciting enough, space shuttle Endeavor blasted off last week with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer tucked into its cargo bay. The mission of the AMS is no less than snagging particles of antimatter and dark matter before they hit Earth's atmosphere. On Thursday, the AMS was successfully installed on the International Space Station (video below), marking the largest and most complex experiment ever housed aboard the ISS (there’s “about 100” experiments currently on the ISS).The figures behind the AMS are kinda staggering. With five separate detectors, the experiment will proves about 10,000 cosmic rays a second, delivering data to Earth via 300,000 separate channels. The hope for all of it – one of many – is nothing less than catching a scrap of the Big Bang itself. How it works: the core component of the AMS is simply a big magnet creating a large and powerful magnetic field that directs cosmic rays into its detectors.NASA explains its antimatter search as such:All evidence currently indicates that the universe is made of matter; however, the Big Bang theory (Figure 4) of the origin of the universe requires equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Theories that explain this apparent asymmetry violate other measurements. Whether or not there is significant antimatter is one of the fundamental questions of the origin and nature of the universe. Any observations of an antihelium nucleus would provide strong evidence for the existence of antimatter.
In 1999, AMS-01 [the detector's first version] established a new upper limit of 10-6 for the antihelium/helium flux ratio in the universe. AMS-02 will search with a sensitivity of 10-9, an improvement of three orders of magnitude, sufficient to reach the edge of the expanding universe and resolve the issue definitively.The AMS dark matter search might sound familiar if you've kept up on the dark matter hunt at Antarctica's IceCube project or Italy's Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory. What we're looking for are theorized dark matter particles called neutrilinos, which we can't actually see, or shouldn't be able to. But, we can see what happens when neutralinos collide with each other and give off other particles, which we'd see as peaks in "background positron, anti-proton, or gamma flux." So the AMS is collecting this ton of data, which is then analyzed on Earth for those data peaks.For this guy's sake, here's hoping.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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