Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 117 Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, The Science. I'm Gary Jordan. I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts,

scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what's going on in the world of

human spaceflight. Coming up very soon, this November 2019,

astronauts aboard the International Space Station are set to

kick off a unique and difficult set of spacewalks to repair an

experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Sounds a lot like something

straight out of sci-fi right, But it's very real and a very complicated piece of equipment.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, is looking at high energy particles and looking for evidence of antimatter and dark matter in the

cosmots which may reveal more about the formation of the universe no big deal.

Now with such a complicated particle physics experiment comes some complicated spacewalks very much on par with the

Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. We'll have to do a podcast on that sometime. So to help bring

to light the significance of this experiment and these spacewalks,

we're going to dive deep into the story of the AMS and this repair, and break it into three parts.

The science, the spacewalks, and the tools, all with fascinating discussions with the experts that are working

on repairing and upgrading the AMS.

So today for part one of this three-part series, we're discussing the science of the AMS focusing on cosmology and astrophysics with Brandon

Radel.

Radel is an assistant program scientist in the International Space Station program here at the

Johnson Space Center. He has a PhD in physics specializing

in high energy space physics. Most of his graduate work was focused on modeling

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