Project Team at Metsähovi: Ritakari, Engelberg, Mujunen, Urpo
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was flown on the space shuttle
Discovery during flight STS-91 in June 1998 in a 51.7 degree orbit at
altitudes between 320 and 390 km. During the flight the Metsähovi
team worked ten days in three shifts in NASA Mission Control Center in
Houston. The detector was successfully tested and a total of
helium nuclei were observed in the rigidity range 1
to 140 GeV. No antihelium nuclei were detected at any rigidity. An
upper limit on the flux ratio of antihelium to helium of
is obtained.
AMS publications can be found on-line at ``http://hpl3tri1.cern.ch/AMS/Publications/''.
A project is underway to build the successor of AMS, AMS-02. It will be based on a superconductive cryomagnet which will considerably improve its capability to detect even the slightest amount of antihelium nuclei. In May 2003 NASA has scheduled a shuttle flight to deliver AMS-02 to the International Space Station (ISS) where it will be deployed for a three-year mission. Experiment integration will start in ETH Zurich in the beginning of 2002, and Metsähovi has been asked to take the responsibility to collect all scientific data coming through the improved version of the HRDL data link. Additionally we have been asked if we would like to be involved in designing and building AMS ICE, ``Internal Computing Equipment'' which would be located on-board on the ISS in an ISPR (International Standard Payload Rack). This shows a high-level endorsement of Metsähovi's abilities to realize demanding scientific data acquisition systems. For this we have been able to leverage many technologies learned during building the astronomical VLBA data acquisition system.