For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA’s claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: “During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails “? If we hadn’t spent tens of billions of dollars to construct the ISS, we might never have known that.
In fairness, though, the ISS can do science that’s awe-inspiring rather than merely ewww-inspiring, and a 7.5-ton particle detector hauled aloft by the space shuttle Endeavour last week is poised to prove that point. Known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2 , it will try to unravel a pair of long-standing mysteries, each of which is literally cosmic in its implications. The first: How much antimatter is out there in the depths of space? And the second: What is the mysterious, invisible dark matter that makes up a quarter of the known universe?
