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A Telescope In a Cubic Kilometer of Ice
Roland Piquepaille writes "University of Delaware (UD) scientists and engineers are currently working at the South Pole under very harsh conditions. This research team is one of the many other ones working on the construction of IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. When it is completed in 2011, the telescope array will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica. One of the lead researchers said that 'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.' The UD team has even opened a blog to cover this expedition. It will be opened up to December 22, 2008. I guess they want to be back in Delaware for Christmas, but read more for additional details and references, including a diagram of this telescope array built inside ice."
Don't take in stray sled dogs from nearby camps. Shoot them before they can get close to your camp, then burn the bodies. I'm just sayin'...
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
This is a neutrino detector. It is not a telescope. It works by detecting electrons or muons created when neutrinos hit the surrounding ice.
There's nothing there. ANWR actually has wildlife.
You surely mean 0.92km^3 of water, don't you?
I was there last year. For some pics of the detectors and the hot water drill used to lower the detector strings see http://spacebit.org/v/places/Antarctica/SouthPole
The drill seems straight out of Austin Powers or Bond for drilling into the core of the earth.
The visualization software (image above) was running on Linux FYI.
Space and Computers.
Actually, there's a similar experiment called ANTARES in the northern hemisphere. Instead of drilling their detector array into the ice, they suspend it in seawater, in the Mediterranean. There are disadvantages to this ... but I guess it worked out to be easier than building one in Greenland.
Incidentally, I'm part of a (small, speculative) project trying to get an even larger detection volume by using the Moon as a neutrino detector[1]. We're not really competing with IceCube or AMANDA, though - we're looking for rarer, higher-energy neutrinos than they are.
[1] Details, if you're interested: a neutrino interacts somewhere near the surface of the moon, and produces a particle shower. That shower emits Cherenkov radiation, some of which takes the form of radio waves, which penetrate to the surface, and may be detected on Earth. The current generation of radio telescopes isn't really sensitive enough for it to work, but the next generation should be. The project name is 'Lunaska'.