NASA Grants $487,259 Funding For Studying Cosmic Rays; America And Japan's International Collaborative Venture

A five-year research project for the study of cosmic rays via antiparticle experiments was granted by NASA. A total of $487,259 funding has been allotted for the project, which is a joint venture of America and Japan. The international team of scientists will work on the design and development of a next-generation cosmic ray balloon antiparticle experiment called General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS).

The GAPS team of scientists belongs to various institutes in America and Japan, including Columbia University, University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The research project will use the novel detection approach to search for low-energy cosmic ray antideuterons, which will help in studying the mysterious dark matter, present abundantly in the universe, reported University of HAWAI'I News.

The project will conduct experiments on long-duration balloon flights from the Antarctica. It is expected that in around four years, the scientists will successfully design, construct and complete testing of the payload and will be ready to launch the first flight by the end of 2020.

In an ongoing project on study of cosmic rays in the space, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was attached to the International Space Station on May 19, 2011. The experiment is funded by the U.S Department of Energy and NASA. In a recently published report in the Symmetry, the AMS has already completed five years in space and has provided valuable data regarding 90 billion cosmic ray events that occurred in space in the last five years. Sam Ting, Nobel Laureate, and Thomas Dudley Cabot, Professor in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussed the results of the AMS experiments and said that "We have a lot to learn from cosmic rays." He also said that cosmic rays could provide humans with the insights related to the balance and imbalance between matter and antimatter in space.

Roger Blandford, theoretical astrophysicist at Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, said that, "Given the success of the standard cosmological model and the absence of gamma rays from hypothetical matter-antimatter interfaces, I think it is very implausible that there'd be whole galaxies made of antimatter."

Roger Blandford further said that cosmic rays may help people study and reveal surprising results on the illusive dark matter that has not been studied directly till date.