When Samuel Ting, the Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist, proposed back in 1995 to use the International Space Station to plumb the depths of the universe for antimatter, it was hailed by NASA as good news for the station, which suffered from the perception that it had no scientific use.
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Photographs by The AMS Collaboration
NASA agreed in 1995 to carry the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station. But now the agency says its remaining shuttle flights are booked.
Dr. Ting’s mission had undeniable heft. His experiment would sift cosmic rays, the high energy particles from the Sun, other stars and even galaxies whizzing through outer space, with unprecedented sensitivity and precision, opening in effect a new window on the universe. By looking for the evil twin opposites of ordinary matter, he and his collaborators hoped to shed light on why the universe appears to be made overwhelmingly of matter, although the laws of physics, including Einstein’s E=mc2, suggest that matter and antimatter should have been born in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Are there reservoirs of antimatter somewhere way out in space?
The discovery of a few antigold nuclei or antihelium ions streaming from an antistar in some distant antigalaxy would rock science, but even if they didn’t find antimatter, Dr. Ting and his team argued that they might detect signals from the mysterious dark matter that accounts for 25 percent of the universe, or see some other significant surprise.
“You don’t know what you are going to get,” he told Science magazine in 1996.
Now, after more than 10 years and $1.5 billion, the 15,000-pound detector is nearly ready for the cosmos, the product of 500 scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries, including China and Taiwan, welded together by Dr. Ting’s organizational energy. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, as it is known, is one of the most expensive scientific experiments ever built. A blue-ribbon panel of physicists appointed by the Energy Department affirmed last fall that the instrument had the potential to make “fundamental new discoveries.” By the end of next year, the project’s managers expect to ship it to the Kennedy Space Center.
The only hitch is that NASA says it no longer has the space to fly its once-prized project. The experiment was dropped from the space shuttle manifest after the Columbia burned up in 2003 and NASA shifted gear and decided to retire the shuttles by 2010. All the remaining flights are booked, either to finish the space station or to revisit the Hubble Space Telescope.
So absent a change of heart by NASA, or the infusion of more money, Dr. Ting’s experiment could languish for all eternity in a NASA clean room.
“I hope that’s not true,” Dr. Ting said by telephone from CERN, the nuclear laboratory outside Geneva where the detector is being assembled, adding that as a particle physicist he reported to the Department of Energy, not NASA. “My responsibility is to build the detector.”
He added, “I hope it gets used, otherwise it would not be good for everyone.”
Beyond the experiment itself, the standoff represents a clash between two of the more strong-willed and brilliant leaders of Big Science in America: Dr. Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is known for his autocratic management style and obsession with detail, and Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, who has shown himself willing to make tough calls in reshaping the space program away from the shuttle and toward the Moon and Mars.
“The loss of Columbia was a huge loss for the entire United States space program aside from the deaths of seven people,” Dr. Griffin said recently in an interview.
“Sam is the one guy we deal with who has not accepted this with reasonable grace,” he said. “He continues to insist that he is a special case. I’m sorry, but he’s not.”
On another level, many scientists say, the standoff is a test of American credibility in international science. NASA signed an “implementing arrangement” with the Department of Energy in 1995, agreeing to fly the Alpha experiment on the station if the department built it. It was on the basis of that document, and a 1998 memorandum of understanding signed by representatives of some two dozen institutions around the world, Dr. Ting says, that scientists from Europe and Asia were able to raise money from their governments for the detector.
George Smoot, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Nobel laureate himself, who served on the blue-ribbon review panel, said, “The real issue is does NASA stand up to its commitments to the D.O.E. and the rest of the world?”
Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology, who led the recent review, said, “It’s a crime to make that kind of investment and then walk away from it.”
Paradoxically, NASA has cited international commitments as a reason to complete the space station. Mark Sistilli, NASA’s project manager for the experiment, noted that it too is “a major, major international project.” He emphasized that it had not been canceled and that NASA would continue to get the experiment ready just in case.
The Department of Energy declined to comment.
Dr. Ting, who won the Nobel in 1976 for his part in discovering the so-called J/Psi particle in 1974, conceived the idea for his space antimatter experiment in 1993 after the United States canceled a giant particle accelerator, the Superconducting Supercollider, narrowing the options for traditional high-energy physics on the Earth.
Skip to next paragraph
Photographs by The AMS Collaboration
NASA agreed in 1995 to carry the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station. But now the agency says its remaining shuttle flights are booked.
Dr. Ting’s mission had undeniable heft. His experiment would sift cosmic rays, the high energy particles from the Sun, other stars and even galaxies whizzing through outer space, with unprecedented sensitivity and precision, opening in effect a new window on the universe. By looking for the evil twin opposites of ordinary matter, he and his collaborators hoped to shed light on why the universe appears to be made overwhelmingly of matter, although the laws of physics, including Einstein’s E=mc2, suggest that matter and antimatter should have been born in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Are there reservoirs of antimatter somewhere way out in space?
The discovery of a few antigold nuclei or antihelium ions streaming from an antistar in some distant antigalaxy would rock science, but even if they didn’t find antimatter, Dr. Ting and his team argued that they might detect signals from the mysterious dark matter that accounts for 25 percent of the universe, or see some other significant surprise.
“You don’t know what you are going to get,” he told Science magazine in 1996.
Now, after more than 10 years and $1.5 billion, the 15,000-pound detector is nearly ready for the cosmos, the product of 500 scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries, including China and Taiwan, welded together by Dr. Ting’s organizational energy. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, as it is known, is one of the most expensive scientific experiments ever built. A blue-ribbon panel of physicists appointed by the Energy Department affirmed last fall that the instrument had the potential to make “fundamental new discoveries.” By the end of next year, the project’s managers expect to ship it to the Kennedy Space Center.
The only hitch is that NASA says it no longer has the space to fly its once-prized project. The experiment was dropped from the space shuttle manifest after the Columbia burned up in 2003 and NASA shifted gear and decided to retire the shuttles by 2010. All the remaining flights are booked, either to finish the space station or to revisit the Hubble Space Telescope.
So absent a change of heart by NASA, or the infusion of more money, Dr. Ting’s experiment could languish for all eternity in a NASA clean room.
“I hope that’s not true,” Dr. Ting said by telephone from CERN, the nuclear laboratory outside Geneva where the detector is being assembled, adding that as a particle physicist he reported to the Department of Energy, not NASA. “My responsibility is to build the detector.”
He added, “I hope it gets used, otherwise it would not be good for everyone.”
Beyond the experiment itself, the standoff represents a clash between two of the more strong-willed and brilliant leaders of Big Science in America: Dr. Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is known for his autocratic management style and obsession with detail, and Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, who has shown himself willing to make tough calls in reshaping the space program away from the shuttle and toward the Moon and Mars.
“The loss of Columbia was a huge loss for the entire United States space program aside from the deaths of seven people,” Dr. Griffin said recently in an interview.
“Sam is the one guy we deal with who has not accepted this with reasonable grace,” he said. “He continues to insist that he is a special case. I’m sorry, but he’s not.”
On another level, many scientists say, the standoff is a test of American credibility in international science. NASA signed an “implementing arrangement” with the Department of Energy in 1995, agreeing to fly the Alpha experiment on the station if the department built it. It was on the basis of that document, and a 1998 memorandum of understanding signed by representatives of some two dozen institutions around the world, Dr. Ting says, that scientists from Europe and Asia were able to raise money from their governments for the detector.
George Smoot, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Nobel laureate himself, who served on the blue-ribbon review panel, said, “The real issue is does NASA stand up to its commitments to the D.O.E. and the rest of the world?”
Barry Barish of the California Institute of Technology, who led the recent review, said, “It’s a crime to make that kind of investment and then walk away from it.”
Paradoxically, NASA has cited international commitments as a reason to complete the space station. Mark Sistilli, NASA’s project manager for the experiment, noted that it too is “a major, major international project.” He emphasized that it had not been canceled and that NASA would continue to get the experiment ready just in case.
The Department of Energy declined to comment.
Dr. Ting, who won the Nobel in 1976 for his part in discovering the so-called J/Psi particle in 1974, conceived the idea for his space antimatter experiment in 1993 after the United States canceled a giant particle accelerator, the Superconducting Supercollider, narrowing the options for traditional high-energy physics on the Earth.
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