He will take a commercial flight to New Zealand, then travel by military aircraft to a U.S.-run station on the coast of Antarctica, and fly from there in a small plane to the South Pole. His job will be to calibrate a remarkable telescope, making sure things are operating as they were designed to.
Neutrinos are the most prevalent objects in the universe.
They pass through the earth unhindered, as no other known particle can do. The fact that they interact only weakly with matter makes them ideal astronomical messengers. Scientists are hoping that the neutrino a particle that is almost nothing may reveal everything about the universe. Today, the operation involves about 75 scientists from 17 institutions in Germany, Sweden, Belgium and the United States. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation in the form of grants to the University of California at Irvine and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among others, with support also from the Swedish Wallenberg Foundation and DESY, a German national laboratory.