AMS-02, the experiment that will seek dark matter, missing matter and antimatter in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS), has recently received the green light to be part of the STS-134 NASA mission in 2010.
NASA has announced that the last or last-but-one mission of the space shuttle programme will be the one that is to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) to the ISS. The space shuttle Discovery is due to lift off in July 2010 and its mission will include the installation of AMS to the exterior of the space station, using arms on both the shuttle and station. Last year both the US House of Representatives and the Senate unanimously approved a bill requesting NASA to install AMS on the ISS, which was signed by president George W Bush a month later.
AMS is a cosmic-ray detector based on technologies developed at CERN, where it is currently based. The installation of the detector to the right side of the space station’s truss will be a delicate operation. It will be lifted out by the shuttle’s robotic arm and handed on to the station’s robotic arm, which will then install AMS in its location.
The astronauts selected for this flight include the European astronaut Roberto Vittori, a colonel in the Italian air force with a degree in physics. He will come to CERN in October with the rest of the crew to learn more about the experiment. The data collected by AMS will be transmitted instantly from the ISS to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally to CERN, where all of the detector controls and physics analyses will be performed.
