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During
the recent austral summer, an international team of scientists
and engineers took a major step forward in building a
subglacial instrument known as IceCube, which is designed
to detect high-energy subatomic particles called neutrinos.
The team harnessed a sophisticated hot-water drill to
install hundreds of basketball-sized optical modules in
the South Pole ice sheet that will eventually form a detector
encompassing a cubic kilometer of ice.
Through a joint project of its Office of Polar Programs
and its mathematical and physical sciences directorate,
NSF is contributing more than $240 million to the international
partnership that is building the $272-million detector.
Germany, Sweden and Belgium are also contributing to the
project. The University of Wisconsin-Madison is leading
the drilling and science operations.
Neutrinos are created in galactic collisions, distant
black holes, quasars and a host of the most violent events
in the cosmos. When fully operational, IceCube will use
4,200 light-sensing modules to sample neutrinos from the
sky in the Northern Hemisphere, using the Earth as a filter
to exclude other types of neutrinos, such as those from
the Sun.
Once the holes are drilled, 1.5-mile (2.5-kilometer)
cables holding the spherical digital optical modules--which
are composed of electronics for sensing light and circuit
boards for gathering and processing data--are frozen in
place. The modules detect evidence of neutrinos when they
collide with other particles. The devices then relay data
to the surface where the information is processed and
stored for analysis.
The IceCube project is an international collaboration
of scientists from more than 30 scientific organizations
and more than a dozen U.S. universities.
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NSF
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