Sun Yat-sen University and Prof. Samuel Chao Chung Ting Continue to Cooperate in Science Experiments on International Space Station

[Xinhua News] On Nov. 20, it is reported that SunYat-senUniversity and the Chinese-American physicist Samuel Chao Chung Ting, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics, will cooperate in AMS-02 which is a series of large-scale experiments carried out on the International Space Station.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment (AMS) initiated by Prof. Ting is a large-scale collaborative science project which is carried out by 56 research institutes from 16 countries and regions and costs about 700 million dollars. This is the first time for human beings to research in space for dark matter and antimatter through experiments with precision instruments and technique of particle physics.

According to the introduction, the Silicon Tracker is the main detector in AMS-02, and SunYat-senUniversity undertakes the task of developing the Tracker Thermal Control System (TTCS) for the Silicon Tracker, ensuring that the detector functions normally. TTCS is the only instrument developed by a college in China for AMS in space.

From the year 2004 till now, SunYat-senUniversity has gained more than ten innovations in technological improvement and redesign for the cooperative project of TTCS. Ever since the first time when Prof. Ting visited Guangzhou in 2007, tests have been done for the TTCS assembly, including the control part, the condenser and other parts, and the testing results show that they meet all the designing requirements. And the assembling of CCTS and AMS-02 has passed the thermal vacuum test.

At present, AMS-02 has been shipped to the launch site at Kenya in the USA, and checkout and preparatory work are now being done. It is estimated that AMS-02 would be launched into space on 27 February 2011.

In the future, with the success of AMS in space station, Sun Yat-sen University will go on cooperating with AMS: not only in the fields of operational maintenance of TTCS and engineering data analysis, but also data analysis in high-energy physics. Excellent teachers and graduate students would be invited to join the international team of AMS, and a joint training of PhD students would be carried out for advancing SunYat-senUniversity’s researches in cosmic particle physics.