A Costly Quest for the Dark Heart of the Cosmos

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After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting. Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space.

The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of what the universe is made of. It could also confer scientific glory on both the International Space Station and a celebrated physicist reaching one last time, literally, for the stars. If it fails, it will validate critics who think it a scandal the experiment was ever approved.

The device, named the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is designed to sift the high-energy particles flying through space known as cosmic rays. On Feb. 27, the space shuttle Endeavour will ferry the spectrometer to a permanent berth on the space station. But the real destination is the shadow universe.

You might think you learned in high school that the universe is made of atoms and molecules, protons and electrons, stars and galaxies, but over the last few decades astronomers have concluded — not happily — that all this is just a scrim overlying a much vaster shadowy realm of invisible “dark matter” whose gravity determines the architecture of the cosmos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a23