AMS experiment marks one year in space

Geneva, 25 July 2012. CERN today marked the first year in space for the  Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) with a visit from the crew of the shuttle mission, STS-134 , that successfully delivered AMS to the  the  International Space Station (ISS) just over a year ago. Launched on 16 May last year, the detector was already sending data back to Earth by 19 May, and since then, some 17 billion cosmic-ray events have been collected. Data are received by NASA in Houston, and then relayed to the AMS Payload Operations Control Centre (POCC) at CERN for analysis. A second POCC has recently been inaugurated in Taipei. "The AMS detector has so far achieved everything we expected of it," said Nobel laureate and AMS spokesperson Samuel Ting. "That's a great credit to the team that put the detector together, and the team that installed it on the ISS.