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Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)
An experiment flown on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS) to search for dark matter, missing matter, and antimatter in space. It uses a variety of instruments to detect particles and measure their electric charge, velocity, momentum, and total energy. Particle physicists hope that its results will shed light on such topics as the Big Bang, the future of the universe, and the nature of dark matter that make up most of the mass of the cosmos.
AMS1 flew on Shuttle mission STS-91 in May 1998. AMS2 will be one of the first experiments to be fixed to the outside of the ISS and is scheduled for launch in 2011.
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