Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, AMS, is an international collaboration of 16 countries in 3 continents, 60 institutes and 600 physicists and engineers. It is used to study the universe and its origin by searching for antimatter, dark matter in the space while performing precision measurement of cosmic rays composition and flux.

The first phase of AMS project, AMS-01, is to conduct feasibility and functionality verification from 1994 to 1998. Continued from 1999, the second phase of AMS project, AMS-02, is to deploy the AMS-02 on the International Space Station (ISS) for a 15~20 years cosmic ray measurement in the space till 2028.

Nobel laureate professor Samuel C. C. Ting of MIT leads the program. Taiwan team consists of scientist and engineers from Academia Sinica, National Central University, National Cheng Kung University, National Chiao Tung University, National Space Organization, Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC), and National Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST). Be a major member in Taiwan team, NCSIST has joined the AMS project since 1995, and is responsible for the design, manufacturing, and test of the Electronic System. The Electronic System is a quadruple redundant computer system, 650 processors are integrated in the system to process more than 300,000 channels of signals from 5 sub-detectors of AMS-02, and download all the scientific data to the Payload Operation and Control Center (POCC) on the ground in real time.