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After a late magnet switch forced NASA to order a six-month deferment of the final planned space shuttle flight, the Kennedy Space Center is preparing to receive a $1.5 billion physics experiment Thursday to seek out the cosmic signature of enigmatic, ubiquitous dark matter.

“If we see a deviation, then this would be new physics – a new contribution,” said Roberto Battiston, the experiment’s deputy principal investigator. “The first candidate that comes to mind would be dark matter.”

Researchers say less than 5 percent of the universe is made of matter – stuff we can see and touch.

“Everything else is something else,” Battiston tells Spaceflight Now.

About 23 percent of the universe is made of something called dark matter. Scientists know this because they can’t account for all the gravity affecting distant stars and galaxies.

The search for antimatter and the characteristics of cosmic rays themselves are also objectives of the AMS mission.

The payload is ultimately bound for the International Space Station, but researchers must first ship AMS from Switzerland to Florida for final assembly and testing before launch aboard the shuttle Endeavour in February.

The shipment is running a few months late after the AMS science team, led by Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, elected to swap the instrument’s powerful helium-cooled superconducting magnet for a permanent device with a longer lifetime.

The frigid superfluid helium would gradually boil off in space, leaving the cryogenic magnet useless after two or three years, scientists say, while the permanent magnet could support observations for more than a decade.

“Even though the permanent magnet has a lower field, we can operate an unlimited amount of time,” Battiston said. “In the end, this configuration is much more suited for very long exposures at the space station.”

The outpost’s pending life extension through at least 2020 played into the AMS team’s decision, according to Battiston, a professor at the University of Perugia and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy.

About 600 physicists from 56 institutions in 16 countries are contributing to the AMS project.

The magnet replacement prompted NASA to flip-flop the last two planned shuttle flights and shove Endeavour’s AMS delivery mission to February 2011.

Workers switched the magnets in June at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The spectrometer was put back together in July and exposed to a high-energy beam of particles last week in a final check of its sensitivity, according to updates on the mission website.

Scientists have since packaged the nearly 16,000-pound platform and other support equipment for loading inside a U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy cargo plane Wednesday in Geneva.

Original story BY STEPHEN CLARK
                        SPACEFLIGHT NOW
               Posted: August 24, 2010
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts134/100824ams

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