Antimatter-hunting will, indeed, become a reality as NASA has officially scheduled for September 16th, 2010, the mission STS-134 which will transport to the International Space Station (ISS) the AMS (Anti-Matter Spectrometer), the European lab for particle physics, carried out with an important contribution by Italy.

A mission prototype was placed into orbit via space shuttle for 15 days in 1998. The original project involved Italy, France, Switzerland, and USA, and was led by Samuel Ting (Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Roberto Battiston (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) as the national representative. The goal of AMS is to find a solution to a fascinating enigma: to understand how asymmetry between matter and antimatter exists in the universe. However, this is a difficult task, as antimatter does not emit any radiation and is, therefore, immune to normal instrument observation.

Johnson Space Center is home to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) Project Office. The AMS-02 experiment is a state-of-the-art particle physics detector being constructed, tested, and operated by an international team composed of 56 institutes from 16 countries and organized under United States Department of Energy (DOE) sponsorship. The JSC project office oversees and directs the overall payload integration activities and ensures that the payload is safe and ready for launch on the Space Shuttle and deployment onto the ISS.

Although the AMS is specifically looking for antimatter and dark matter, as the first magnetic spectrometer in space, AMS has, and will, collect information from cosmic sources emanating from stars and galaxies millions of light years beyond the Milky Way. The technical challenges to build such a detector for use in space have been surmounted through the close collaboration of the AMS scientists and industries around the world whose efforts have resulted in the development of new technologies and higher standards of precision. AMS will provide the first operational experience with a superconducting cryogenic magnet in space and greatly extend the knowledge base regarding superfluid cryogenic systems operation in space. These are enabling technologies for the potential use of magnetic shielding as a method of radiation protection during extended manned space flight, as well as for space power and propulsion systems.

(Source: AvioNews + NASA, images courtesy of NASA - upper left, AMS-02 positioned on ISS' S3 Truss - lower right, AMS-02 Detector integration)