Science: NASA says it is willing to fly a $1.5 billion experiment designed to detect antimatter. But Congress would have to come up with as much as $4 billion to make it happen, the agency says. Supporters of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) dispute those cost estimates but face an uphill struggle to get the 7000-kg probe into orbit.

In a 17-page report to Congress that was released two weeks ago, NASA paints a sobering picture of what it would take to attach the instrument to the international space station. Samuel Ting, the physics Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has championed the project, says the 16-nation AMS collaboration has no money to buy another ride into space.

Related Physics Today article
NASA cancels science flight, ditches international partners (May 2007, page 30)