It took 10 years to complete, cost over $271 Million and is buried under the South-Pole. It's the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and it's a telescope longer than the World's tallest skyscrapers stacked one on another. (Total length is over 1.4kms!)
The construction of this massive project wrapped up last week making it the World's largest neutrino observatory.
The IceCube observatory is operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison joint with the National Science Foundation, with funding provided by the United States, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden. The Barbados, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the UK are also contributing help in the form of researchers.
The ultimate goal is to find extremely high energy neutrinos—tiny subatomic particles—originating from supernova explosions, gamma-ray bursts and black holes (with an emphasis on expanding humankind's knowledge of Dark-Matter).
The projects principal investigator, Francis Halzen, stated optimistically:
Since the 1970s we have dreamed of building a detector of this size, and we have spent 20 years working toward IceCube [...] If the science to come brings half the excitement of completing this instrument, we have a bright future ahead. With the completion of IceCube, we are on our way to reaching a level of sensitivity that may allow us to see neutrinos from sources beyond the sun.
During the project, researchers have posted a great blog titled IceCube which you can check out here!
Cheers to the unimaginable immensity of human endeavors; We are only limited by our imagination...and our $271 million dollar budgets!
-D-
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