Other than high-energy particle accelerators, where on Earth would you look for antimatter? The answer seems to be high above Antarctica. A team of scientists led by Akira Yamamoto of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) is actively hunting antimatter that may be striking the Earth from space. The detector: an instrument carried by a 40-million cubic foot balloon that is circling the South Pole at an altitude of 39 kilometers (24 miles). If successful, the team will learn a good deal about antimatter and may prove the existence of so-called Hawking radiation, low-energy antiprotons created by ancient black holes from the Big Bang era. Called BESS-Polar (Balloon-borne Experiment with a Superconducting Spectrometer), the experiment is a collaborative effort that unites KEK and various Japanese agencies including the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with NASA. BESS has been tested in Canada and used to study cosmic rays; it also collected a small number of...

Antihydrogen, now produced for the first time in Switzerland at the CERN facility, may be the ultimate fuel, producing a thousand times more energy than fission or fusion methods. But what will it take to produce enough antihydrogen for practical use? After all, we now produce antimatter in the amount of mere nanograms per year. And ponder this: CERN estimates that, to create a kilogram of antimatter with present methods would take all the energy produced on the Earth for ten million years. Considered in more everyday terms, the amount of antimatter produced each year in an accelerator laboratory like CERN or Fermilab is about enough to make a 100-watt bulb shine for fifteen minutes. What we need is a dedicated antiproton source, an idea often discussed by interstellar guru Robert Forward, and now advanced in a new paper to be published in the Prceedings of the 2004 NASA/JPL Workshop on Physics for Planetary Exploration. First noted in SpaceRef, the title is "Controlled Antihydrogen...

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts is in the midst of its 6th annual meeting, at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. For interstellar theorists, the chief attraction this time around is Steve Howe's presentation "Antimatter Driven Sail for Deep Space Missions." The co-founder and chief executive officer of Hbar Technologies, LLC based in Chicago, Howe has devised a Kuiper Belt mission using a uranium-infused sail that would be driven by a cloud of anti-hydrogen released from the spacecraft. Left: A cloud of anti-hydrogen drifts towards the uranium-infused sail. CREDIT: Hbar Technologies, LLC/Elizabeth Lagana Sails and nuclear reactions have been paired before; in particular, in Johndale Solem's Project Minerva, which posited setting off a nuclear explosion behind the sail to drive a spacecraft. Howe's idea was to use nano-explosions on the sail itself. The sail would be a mixture of graphite and a new carbon-fiber material commonly known as carbon-carbon fused together, with tiny amounts...

On my visit to MSFC in Huntsville last summer, I was able to tour the Propulsion Research Center, where antimatter research is continuing, with the focus on HiPat (High Performance AntiProton Trap), an antimatter containment device capable of holding a trillion antiprotons. This article on Space.com (I hope you're using a popup blocker) gives an overview of work at Marshall, though readers interested in HiPat should check Penn State's research pages. Ray Lewis, who showed me around the HiPat facility, is a faculty member at PSU. The goal is to bring antiprotons from FermiLab, near Chicago, to Huntsville; think of antimatter rolling down I-24 in the passing lane. Storing and moving antimatter safely is a key challenge for interstellar propulsion studies.