spacetoday.net: ISS experiment to publish data on dark matter soon

Posted: Tue, Feb 19, 2013, 7:22 AM ET (1222 GMT)
The Nobel laureate leader of a particle physics experiment on the International Space Station said Sunday that his team plans to soon publish its first paper with findings from the instrument that could offer new insights into the nature of dark matter. Samuel Ting said at a conference in Boston that his team will submit a paper in the next two to three weeks with first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) instrument. The billion-dollar AMS, installed on the station's exterior on the STS-134 shuttle mission in 2011, is designed to detect a variety of high-energy particles. The first results, Ting said, will be of the ratio of positrons to electrons as a function of both the particles' energy and direction, data that could support models about the nature of unseen dark matter. Other initial results from AMS data are due out later this year, he said.