Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna

The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment has been designed to study ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic neutrinos by detecting the radio pulses emitted by their interactions with the Antarctic ice sheet. This is to be accomplished using an array of radio antennas suspended from a helium balloon flying at a height of about 37,000 meters.

The neutrinos, with energies on the order of 10¹⁸ eV, produce radio pulses in the ice because of the Askaryan effect. It is thought that these high-energy cosmic neutrinos result from interaction of ultra-high-energy (10²⁰ eV) cosmic rays with the photons of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It is thus hoped that the ANITA experiment can help to explain the origin of these cosmic rays.

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