Antimatter scout to hitch last shuttle ride

By Irene Klotz

updated 4:58 p.m. ET April 27, 2009

The crowning glory of the International Space Station has nothing to do with preparing humans to live on the moon or finding a cure for Salmonella. It's a particle detector designed to hunt for an antimatter universe.

This week, NASA resumes work to shutter the shuttle program at the end of 2010, but it is planning for one extra mission to ferry the 7.5-ton detector, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, to the station in late 2010. Though Congress has authorized the mission, it has not yet allocated the funds (an estimated $300 million) to NASA for the flight.

"I have learned in the 15 years working with space experiments you are only confident once you are on the space station taking data," said Samuel Ting, the Nobel Prize physicist who leads the AMS team.

"My main job at this moment is to make sure (in) the final phase of the assembly of the detector, that nothing goes wrong," Ting told Discovery News.

Ting, who was a co-discoverer of the first complex antimatter particle, said he's been wondering for more than 45 years about the missing mass that should have been created along with regular matter at the birth of the universe.

"At the beginning, if you have an electron, you must have a positron. If [you] have a proton, you must have an anti-proton. In other words, there must be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter," Ting said.

"It always troubled me; where's the universe made out of antimatter? That was basically one of the reasons we proposed this experiment," he added. "This is somewhat of a definitive experiment to see whether [an] antimatter universe really exists or not."

AMS was eliminated from the shuttle's manifest following the 2003 Columbia accident, when the United States decided to retire the fleet for safety and cost reasons, upon completion of the space station in 2010. NASA is developing new spaceships that can travel to the moon as well as the station.

The outcry over AMS' cancellation was sharp, particularly because most of its $1.5-billion price tag was picked up by a huge and still-growing international partnership that is backing the program. NASA's role was to fly AMS to space and install it outside the station.

Last year, Congress restored the mission and told NASA to delay until April 30 taking any steps that would preclude shuttle operations beyond 2010. The idea was to give the new administration a chance to keep the shuttles flying longer so that the United States wouldn't have to be dependent on Russia for ferrying crews to the station while the new vehicles are being built. The shuttle replacement is not expected to debut until about 2015.

But with no new orders from the Obama administration, NASA is poised to resume shutting down shuttle manufacturing and assembly lines as early as May 1, preserving the option for just one additional mission: flying AMS.

"We are prepared to be able to fly that mission," said LeRoy Cain, deputy shuttle program manager. "But that requires some additional funding that we have not yet secured."

"AMS is a fitting experiment for the International Space Station," added Trent Martin, who is overseeing the project for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It's very big science. It's international cooperation at its best."

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