New Endeavour for an MIT experiment
Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final mission, launched May 16, has successfully delivered MIT researchers’ Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) — an instrument designed to use the unique environment of space to search for antimatter and dark matter and to measure cosmic rays — to the International Space Station.The principal investigator of the AMS experiment is Samuel Ting, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Physics at MIT, who led the design, construction and commissioning of AMS with his Electromagnetic Interactions Group at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Ting shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976 with Burton Richter ’52, PhD ’56 for discovering the J/Psi particle, a heavy elementary particle.The AMS experiment is designed to study high-energy particles; such study could lead to new theories about the formation and evolution of the universe. “We can look for dark matter, look for antimatter and look for strangelets,” Ting said at a news...