After an 11 hour-long flight, the US Air Force C-5 Galaxy carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) experiment has landed at the Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) in Florida, US. Yesterday, at the Geneva International Airport, the 7.5-ton experiment had been loaded into the aircraft, which is one of the largest in the world.

At the KSC, AMS-02 will undergo a few additional tests in the Space Station Processing Facility of NASA before being launched on board the Space Shuttle Discovery on its final mission to space. Once docked on the International Space Station, the experiment will collect data for more than a decade.

From space, AMS-02 will examine fundamental issues about matter and the origin and structure of the Universe. Its main scientific target is the search for dark matter and antimatter, in a programme that is complementary to that of the Large Hadron Collider.