This report was recommended for approval by the LHC Committee and endorsed by the Research Board. Final approval by the CERN Director-General was given in September 1997. The AMS Experiment in Space One of the fundamental unanswered questions concerning the stucture and composition of the universe is whether antimatter of cosmological origin exists in the Universe today in a measurable quantity. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe requires matter and antimatter to be equally abundant. Another mystery concerns the missing matter in our Universe.
Dark matter is also essential for cosmology.
In the Big Bang inflation picture the Universe is balanced between eternal expansion and ultimate collapse. The question of what this dark matter is composed of still needs to be experimentally clarified. AMS will provide the first detailed measurements of charged particles outside the earth's atmosphere. In addition, there are electronics and support structures and interfaces. AMS will have two missions in space.