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Set high on a mountain plain in China, an ambitious observatory will offer a unique perspective on the origins of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that rain down on Earth. Construction has started on the project, which will probe, for the first time, ultra-high-energy γ-rays — bursts of radiation thought to be produced alongside cosmic rays in our Galaxy, but whose origins are easier to track.
The 1.3-square-kilometre site near Daocheng in Sichuan, close to Tibet, received the go-ahead in January, after an environmental report convinced the government that construction would not harm the threatened white-lipped deer (Cervus albirostris) and other animals in a nearby nature reserve. Now, contractors are installing infrastructure for the 1.2-billion-yuan (US$174-million) Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO).
"This will be the leading project to clarify questions of cosmic-ray physics," says Giuseppe Di Sciascio, a particle physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Rome. Di Sciascio, along with researchers from a number of countries, including Switzerland, Russia and Thailand, hopes to collaborate on the project. Chief among the physics questions that LHAASO will investigate is what accelerates cosmic rays — charged particles such as protons or atomic nuclei — to such high energies. Some cosmic rays that hit Earth have energies millions of times greater than the energies produced by the most powerful human-made particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists have proposed certain celestial phenomena, such as black holes or supernovae, as origins, but no one has confirmed this conclusively.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2017, @02:36PM
but somehow the self-proclaimed defenders of fiscal responsibility are not batting an eye to dump many tens of billions on a "great wall" that won't work
Because you aren't supporting that project. I oppose that as well. You miss the point of the funding game. The purpose is to create sacred cows to protect spending like on the "great wall". Because anyone who will cut the funding of the big wasteful projects will also cut the funding of the wasteful research projects you happen to support or benefit from.
This is particularly the case with stuff like Social Security/public employee pension funds, and public health care programs. Roughly half the US budget (including "off budget") is in that sort of program. Any serious budget cutter has to deal with those as well. Either risk pissing off a huge number of voters, or fail to make a dent in the US budget. These programs are an ongoing ugly bribe to the voter to look the other way while tens of billions of dollars go poof.