In its first 18 months, AMS analyzed 25 billion primary cosmic ray events.
It is designed to detect showers of billions of secondary particles created when cosmic ray particles rain down on the Earth.
Svensmark then teamed up with Friis-Christensen to review solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic ray levels recorded using satellite data available since 1979.
Eichler thinks that such a sun-grazing comet may have triggered a large solar flare and cosmic ray-generating shockwaves as recently as 775 A.D.
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The cosmic ray particle physics detector was carried to the International Space Station on the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour and installed under NASA direction.
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But when sun spot activity is low, a condition that can sometimes persist over decades and longer, the increased cosmic ray bombardment produces more cloud cover, hence cooling influences.
Climate scientists point out that there is evidence to show that the sustained rise in global temperatures over the past 15 years cannot be explained by cosmic ray activity.
As Dr Colin described on July 9th to the International Cosmic Ray Conference held in Lodz, Poland, the moon blocks electrons and positrons as effectively as it blocks light.
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"As the most precise measurement of the cosmic ray positron flux to date, these results show clearly the power and capabilities of the AMS detector, " Ting said, according to the CERN statement.
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Although the probe would carry no cameras in the classic sense, its onboard instruments would include a low-energy charged particle experiment, a magnetometer, a cosmic ray detector, and an energetic neutral atom detector.
The probe entered a special low-altitude orbit for about five months to allow the GRAND instrument to analyze emissions from Vesta's surface that result from collisions between cosmic ray particles and elements in the asteroid's dirt.
"Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere, " explained Prof Bill Webber from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
And Giles Harrison believes climate sceptics need to apply the same scepticism to the cosmic ray theory as they do to greenhouse warming - particularly those who say there are too many holes in our understanding of how clouds behave in the man-made greenhouse.
Or so says David Eichler, lead author of a forthcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters paper positing that a sun-grazing comet roughly the size of Hale-Bopp (with a nucleus some 30 kms in diameter), could trigger cosmic ray-generating shockwaves large enough to initiate a global electromagnetic Armageddon.
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But if Svensmark was correct, it would mean that periods of high solar output should coincide with reduced cloud formation (due to reduced cosmic ray incidence), which in turn would have a warming effect on the Earth, since less sunlight would be reflected back into space by clouds.
But the flood of more visible cosmic -ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.
He also finds that wobbles in the earth's temperature have followed those in the cosmic-ray flux for the past 60-odd years.
They compared the cosmic-ray flux with the proportion of the world's skies obscured by cloud, a figure that has been available from satellite photographs since 1979.
His (as yet unpublished) research confirms, he says, that the variations in cloud cover seen by satellites match those in cosmic-ray flux better than anything else, such as the sun's total brightness.
But, a detailed analysis of the lunar samples by Kuni Nishiizumi, from the University of California at Berkeley, and Marc Caffee, from Purdue University, suggests that far more beryllium exists in the soil than can be accounted for by cosmic-ray delivery alone.
Interestingly, an April 18 paper in the journal Nature reported that upper limits for neutrinos measured from IceCube are low enough that gamma-ray bursts are unlikely to be the sole source of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.
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