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."

Comments

Does not look promising

[pwnies]

I gotta say, just based on personal experience here, that the outlook for this project doesn't look good. The last underground science facility I worked at over in Raccoon City just didn't work out in the long run.

Re:Does not look promising

[Sponge Bath]

Dangerous things found in Antarctica:
'The Thing' (Kurt Russel in a Cowboy hat!)
The Borg from Star Trek
Aliens v Predator
Vicious Penguins

Re:Does not look promising

[A. B3ttik]

Really? The underground science facility I work at over at Black Mesa is more productive than ever. In fact, we're boosting the antimass spectrometer to 105% for a big test tomorrow.

Bullcrap!

[cashman73]

Yeah, it's a telescope alright! Ha! Ha! I got $500 that says they found a second Stargate down there!

Does Ice Cube approve

[line-bundle]

Definitely Ice Cube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cube won't like it.

Perhaps time to call in the RIAA and fix this.

South central actually...

[MRe_nl]

Neutrino's with Attitude!

Re:South central actually...

[Ambitwistor]

IceCube is designed to detect neutrino events only from the northern hemisphere. Neutrinos from the sky in the southern hemisphere get confused with other atmospheric muons events. So they screen out all events coming from above, and only look at those coming from below, i.e. from the north. Neutrinos have no problem passing through the Earth, but all other particles do, so they know that events from below come from neutrinos.

Still, you can rephrase the question: why don't they build a detector in the Arctic to look for southern events? The only place there's that much land ice is Greenland. There isn't much infrastructure there. There is some already at the South Pole. I suspect that's the reason. But if IceCube proves successful, maybe they'll think about a Greenland version.

Re:South central actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

The Hardest Part

[Greyfox]

Is getting the purchase order for a cubic kilometer of gin through the purchasing system.

Ice...for now.

[MMC Monster]

By the time it is finished, it will be in a cubic kilometer of water.

Re:Big Science

[Ambitwistor]

And how come it's always physics physics physics?

That's the science where you have to build the biggest equipment, because big equipment is needed to study the extremely small or the extremely large (particle physics and astronomy).

Biomedicine/genomics is slowly starting to encroach on physics in terms of Big Science. But there is also tons of science which is not Big Science.

And mostly, telescopes?

Telescopes and particle accelerators. See above.

If someone goes to the NSF and asks for billions to build a really big computer to do AI research on, the NSF tells them to go talk to IBM.

The NSF mostly funds science (national Science foundation). Computer science doesn't get as much of a priority with them, since it's more mathematics/engineering.

Also, with a billion-dollar particle accelerator, people are likely to discover new fundamental things about the universe we live in. With a billion-dollar computer, can we guarantee any breakthroughs in AI? I don't know that hardware is the limiting factor here.

Re:Not a telescope.

[spsheridan]

I guess a telescope isn't a telescope, it's a light detector. It detects light that hits it mirrors...

These neutrino telescopes work by detecting Cherenkov Radiation created by the collision by-products and then determining the track of the particle that is emmiting the Cherenkov Radiation. The momentum of the original Neutrino is conserved so the track of the by-product is very close to the original trajectory.

You filter out downward tracks because they are generally caused by atmospheric cosmic radiation - the earth is basically your filter here, only neutrino's will be coming up through the earth. It's called a telescope because they hope to be able to correlate neutrino tracks with actual stellar objects - once the detector is large enough (hence the cubic kilometer size) there should be a sufficient cross section of matter to have a regular set of interactions from persistent neutrino sources.

This is an extension of the AMANDA research project, they drilled the original series of test holes in the 90's to prove the process would work - I helped build some of the detector equipment back in Wisconsin while I was an undergrad there.

Re:important safety tip:

[spsheridan]

My understanding is that The Thing is required viewing at the start of each Winter Season at the South Pole research station - if you think about who actually would spend a winter at the south pole I think you can see why they would be all over this kind of thing.

IceCube? Violence?

[therufus]

'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.'

So NWA have a new album out? O.o

I was there last year

[HoneyBeeSpace]

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.