Latest Shuttle News
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 Installed
Thu, 19 May 2011 11:52:21 AM UTC+0200
At 5:46 a.m. EDT, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) was installed successfully on the outside of the International Space Station's right side. Mission Specialists Andrew Feustel and Roberto Vittori used the space shuttle’s robotic arm to extract it from Endeavour's payload bay. They handed it off to the space station’s Canadarm2, and Pilot Greg Johnson and Mission Specialist Greg Chamitoff then used the robotic arm to install AMS on the starboard side of the station’s truss.
The AMS team will monitor the experiment 24 hours a day, gathering data for as long as the space station is in orbit. Using a large magnet to create a magnetic field that will bend the path of the charged cosmic particles already traveling through space, eight different instruments will provide information on those particles as they make their way through the magnet.
Armed with that information, hundreds of scientists from 16 countries are hoping to determine what composes the universe and how it began, as the AMS searches for clues on the origin of dark matter and the existence of antimatter and other unusual matter. AMS also could provide information about pulsars, blazers, gamma ray bursts and any number of other cosmic phenomena.
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
Specifications:
o Mass: 14,809 lb (6,717 kg) or 6731 kg (14,839 lb)
o Power: 2000–2500 watts
o Internal data rate: 10 Gbit/s
o Data rate to ground: 2 Mbit/s
o Primary mission duration: 10 to 18 years
o Magnetic field intensity: 0.125 teslas produced by a 1,200 kg Nd2Fe14B permanent magnet
Module design:
o Transition radiation detector measures the velocities of the highest energy particles
o Upper time of flight counter, along with the lower time of flight counter, measures the velocities of lower energy particles
o Star tracker determines the orientation of the module in space
o Silicon tracker measures the coordinates of charged particles in the magnetic field
o Permanent magnet bends the path of charged particles so they can be identified
o Anti-coincidence counter rejects stray particles that enter through the sides
o Ring imaging Cherenkov detector measures velocity of fast particles with extreme accuracy
o Electromagnetic calorimeter measures the total energy of the particles
Bilder aus Wikipedia.en
(1) Location of the AMS on the International Space Station (upper left)
(2) A computer generated image showing AMS-02 mounted to the ISS S3 Upper Inboard Payload Attach Site