Culminating a decade of planning, innovation and testing, construction of the world’s largest neutrino observatory was successfully completed today.
The final string of optical sensors was installed in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive ice-bound telescope that fills a cubic kilometer of deep Antarctic ice. The main IceCube detector now contains 5,160 optical sensors on 86 strings embedded two kilometers below the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
From its vantage point at the end of the world, IceCube provides an innovative means to investigate the properties of fundamental particles that originate in some of the most spectacular phenomena in the universe. Its sophisticated optical sensors, frozen into some of the purest ice on Earth, record the rare collisions between the water molecules of the ice and neutrinos – tiny, nearly massless sub-atomic particles that pass undetected through most matter.
Very cool project that I have been watching
