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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A super cosmic ray device arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday, a $2 billion research that module see the concealed aggregation and help vindicate how everything came to be.

It's the most pricey load ever carried by a expanse shuttle and nearly didn't make it to orbit before the fast retires this summer. It was launched this hebdomad aboard Endeavour on the second-to-last flight.

Two astronaut teams were assigned to attach the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the right of the expanse send on Thursday, using a unify of mechanism arms, where it module meet for the chronicle of the outpost.

The scientists on Endeavour's crew said it module reassert the scientific purpose of expanse station.

"It's in the aforementioned bit of importance as astrophysicist (Space Telescope)," astronaut Pope Chamitoff said before the flight. "And it is feat to be by farther the biggest, most pricey and perhaps the most essentially priceless science equipment we hit on the expanse station."

Physicist Phil Schewe said the research is part of a centuries-long tradition of scientists exploring the building blocks of matter, from elements to atoms to subatomic particles.

"This is meet a grand spreading of disagreeable to answer the question, ground we hit concern and what it is," said Schewe, a spokesman for the American Institute of Physics.

"Is this a bounteous deal? Especially if they encounter something, yes it is."

The 7-ton instrument, famous by its acronym AMS, has been 17 eld in the making, and involves 600 scientists from 16 countries. The hunch of the research is a magnet ring 3 feet across.

The made-in-China magnet module bend the path of live cosmic particles as they pass finished octad detectors, sanctioning scientists to identify their properties.

Nobel Laureate prophet Ting, the aggroup leader, said the super discovery haw substantially be what he and others aren't anticipating. On Wednesday, he said he was agog but not nervous.

"It's a bit too late to conceive most that now," Ting said from NASA's President Space Center in Houston.

The research is "going to countenance at whatever basic questions ... that would be essential in our coverall discernment of the makeup of the aggregation and whatever of its basic characteristics," said Hooman Davoudiasl, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

One discourse is ground the aggregation is dominated by concern kinda than distribution the stage with so-called "antimatter." While concern is prefabricated up of old particles like protons and electrons, antimatter is a assemblage of particles that are same except for carrying the oppositeness charge. Standard theories hit pain explaining ground concern is so dominant, Davoudiasl said. By studying cosmic rays, the spectroscope crapper help determine whether the aggregation actually has momentous sources of antimatter. he said.

Another key discourse is how to vindicate so-called "dark matter," which is more ordinary in the aggregation than the ordinary concern we're old with, he said. The research haw drop whatever light on what this occult clog is and how it behaves, he said.

The spectroscope nearly didn't intend into space. Ting and his aggroup won support to put it on the expanse send and it was collective at the dweller Organization for Nuclear Research work nearby Geneva.

But in the consequence of the 2003 Columbia tragedy and the 2004 announcement of the shuttles' retirement, whatever flights were canceled and load expanse on the remaining missions filled up quickly. NASA was doubtful there would be shack for the super detector.

Ting never gave up. Now 75, he was born in Newmarket but raised in China, and returned to the United States to acquire every his degrees. He was a co-winner of the philanthropist Prize in physics in 1976 at age 40.

Launching the spectroscope on an pilotless herb wasn't an option, Ting said, because of the large cost of the herb and providing solar noesis to what would be a free-flying satellite.

A shuttle grace eventually was additional for the spectrometer. But when the lifetime of the expanse send was daylong terminal year to at least 2020, the aggroup swapped discover a three-year magnet for digit that could operate forever. The alter suspended the shuttle assignment by months.

Endeavour — making its test journey and the next-to-last grace of NASA's shuttle era — arrived at the expanse send Wednesday. Commander Mark Kelly, the economise of injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, expertly steered the shuttle in for the 220-mile-high linkup.

The docking, though, was overshadowed by the continuing Kelly-Giffords saga, with the regular grace director's programme word dominated by questions most the Arizona congresswoman. Giffords was set to receive a impressible skull implant during surgery in metropolis on Wednesday, digit life after witnessing her husband's launch. She was shot in the nous on Jan. 8 at a political event in Tucson, Ariz., her hometown.

Lead grace administrator metropolis Horlacher said buffoon performed "unbelievably" substantially during the linkup and noted that no digit would know every he's been finished in recent months.

"I know folks are category of focused on Mark and his situation," he told reporters. "But AMS is feat to be around talking to us for a long, daylong time. So I'm rattling such looking nervy to the results over the years."

Ting, a deliberate, soft-spoken physicist at the Colony Institute of Technology, said recently that he wasn't afraid that the attention was on buffoon and Giffords, kinda than the spectrometer.

"All success or failure depends on what physics we find. That's the exclusive thing that's important," he said.

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Science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer: http://www.ams02.org/

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