The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a billion++ $ experiment designed to look at cosmic rays (and to have the absolutely worst set of project web pages yet discovered).
In particular it will look at the anti-matter content of cosmic rays, and angle to see if it can detect some signature of dark matter.
It is almost ready to be delivered, and will almost certainly never fly...
...see, it turns out that the remaining Shuttle schedule, which is dedicated to deliveries to the International Space Station, except for the one Hubble refurbishment flight, does not actually include a slot to fly the AMS.
The AMS is pretty much the sole surviving real science experiment destined for the space station, so this leaves us wondering even more just exactly what the completed ISS is to do with itself.
Of course AMS suffers from the significant flaw of having been largely funded as a large international collaboration painstakingly put together by the project scientist, with NASA and the DoE only having chipped in few tens of millions.
Absolute insanity.
AMS at Bologna University has a useful set of web pages with actual information on them.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
SPACE SCIENCE: NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Lawler
Science 16 March 2007: 1476
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1476
News of the Week
SPACE SCIENCE:
NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Andrew Lawler
NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, which is designed to search for antimatter from
its perch on the international space station.
===========
Hey, isn't that the Samuel Ting-Michael Salamon project?
Yes, it is:
http://ams.cern.ch/AMS/Secretariat/AmsWhosWho.html
NASA HQ is surely going WAY over the edge in punishing Michael Salamon. He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the Director of Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
This was to be the major actual Science experiment on the space station. And they are killing it -- why? I am leaning towards thinking that it is a purely political decision, as the "room" or money argument is unconvincing, and as I say, it seems to be the #1 science project in the entire Space Station program.
If one detects even a single anti-carbon nucleus, one almost has to conclude that someplace there is an anti-star performinbg anti-nucleosyntheis, which exploded asn anti-supernova.
What a huge discovery that would be by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. For that tremendous science value per dollar ratio alone, it should fly.
I am going to write to my congressman and senators. Maybe it would be worth writing to, say, Oprah. The tax-paying public deserves to have SOME science done with their NASA tax dollars.
He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the Director of Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
It's not quite as bad as this (though almost). From what Michael has told me, he was looking forward to the OSTP job --- it was something that (I think) he was genuinely excited about doing. But the whole time he was there, he was considered "on loan" from NASA, and remained officially a NASA employee.
He was definitely pulled out for political reasons, though. I never got the full story, but the impression I got from Michael and Ron Hellings is that NASA suddenly decided they couldn't afford to have people out working at other agencies, and pulled them all back in. Again, Michael was fairly quiet about it, but he definitely gave the impression that he wasn't happy being jerked around.
One of my fears is that he's going to get fed up with all the BS and just walk. From my perspective, he's been very helpful and quite an asset for the community.