Cosmic ray hunter installed on space station

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle detector was mounted outside the International Space Station on Thursday for an ambitious survey to discover new forms of matter.
The visiting shuttle Endeavour astronauts used robotic cranes to pluck the 7.5-ton instrument, known as AMS, out of their ship's cargo hold and install it onto the space station's metal truss, where it will operate throughout the life of the station.
"AMS looks absolutely fantastic on the truss," Endeavour commander Mark Kelly radioed to the program's lead scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nobel laureate Samuel Ting.
The spectrometer is designed to parse through the river of high-energy cosmic rays streaming through space for signs of dark matter, antimatter and other phenomena that cannot be detected by traditional telescopes.
Scientists expect AMS will reshape their understanding of the universe, much the same way that the Hubble Space Telescope pioneered new frontiers in astronomy, including the startling discovery that the universe's rate of expansion is speeding up.
AMS has a powerful magnet to shepherd cosmic rays through a series of detectors that can reveal electrical charges, energy levels and other information. Data is taken at a rate of 25,000 times a second, processed by onboard computers and relayed to scientists on the ground.
"Thank you very much for the great ride and safe delivery of AMS to the station. Your support and fantastic work has taken us one step closer to realizing the scientific potential of AMS," Ting, who oversees the 600-member, 16-nation AMS science team, radioed to the shuttle and station crew.
Endeavour blasted off Monday for a 16-day mission, the next-to-last flight before NASA retires its three-ship shuttle fleet. It arrived at the station on Wednesday.
Inflight inspections showed some damage to Endeavour's heat-resistant belly tiles.
"There's three areas that are a little bit of a concern. The team on the ground will decide in the next couple of days if we have to take a closer look at it, but we've seen this kind of stuff before and it's not too much of a concern for us," Kelly said Thursday during an inflight interview.
Kelly is married to U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who is recovering from a January 8 assassination attempt that killed six and injured 12 others.
She watched Endeavour's launch at the Kennedy Space Center with the families of the Endeavour crew, then returned to Houston. The Arizona Democrat, who was shot through the head, underwent surgery Wednesday.
"She's doing really well. Everything went as planned," Kelly said.
The Endeavour astronauts are preparing for the first of four spacewalks for maintenance and servicing of the space station on Friday.
The shuttle is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 1.
By Irene Klotz taken from http://ca.news.yahoo.com/cosmic-ray-hunter-installed-space-station-111021364.html