27 Oct ’22

PolarquEEEst

POLAR cosmic ray detector board Italian Navy ship Amerigo Vespucci

Transport of the detector onto the Amerigo Vespucci, the “most beautiful ship in the world”. (Photo credits Luisa Cifarelli)

From Nanuq to the “the most beautiful ship in the world”: the POLAR cosmic ray detector boards Italian Navy tallship Amerigo Vespucci

POLAR, the twin brother of the PolarquEEEst cosmic ray detector, boarded Italian tallship Amerigo Vespucci last October 8 in Trieste and is currently collecting data in the Mediterranean. The initiative, started off by Professor Marcello Abbrescia of the University of Bari is once again part of the EEE project, and specifically a collaboration between INFN and the Universities of Bari and Bologna.

“This PolarquEEEst initiative has its foundation with the University of Bari, which has been organising courses for the Naval Academy for several years now,” says Prof. Abbrescia.

The Historical Museum Enrico Fermi in Rome (CREF) and the Turin Polytechnical University. The detector is identical to POLAR-1, the detector that travelled on board Nanuq around the Svalbard archipelago during Polarquest2018, reaching the still today Northernmost latitude ever by a cosmic ray detector, 82°07’ North,

The POLAR detector on the Amerigo Vespucci. (Photo credits Luisa Cifarelli)

During this voyage aboard Amerigo Vespucci along the Italian and Albanian coasts, POLAR will measure the variations in latitude of the cosmic ray flux over a 10° latitude range. The new measurements will complete those obtained by the companion Polar detectors at the northern latitudes. It will then head to the extreme North of Finland in 2023, for a new joint Polarquest.org and PolarquEEEst adventure. Stay tuned!

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