On May 19, 2011, astronauts used a remote-controlled robotic arm to attach a nearly 17,000-pound payload to the side of the International Space Station. That payload was the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS-02, an international experiment sponsored by the US Department of Energy and NASA.
AMS was designed to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic particles and nuclei that bombard the Earth from space. Since its installation, AMS has collected data from more than 90 billion cosmic ray events, experiment lead Sam Ting reported today in a colloquium at the experiment’s headquarters, CERN European research center.
Ting, a Nobel Laureate and Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared a mix of new and recent results during his talk. Together they spelled out the persistent message of the AMS experiment: We have a lot left to learn from cosmic rays.
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