On February 12, an unusual convoy of trucks left CERN early in the morning, headed for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ESTEC Center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The trucks were carrying the fully integrated AMS-02 spectrometer along with all the necessary ground equipment to operate it during qualification tests in space.

During the week before being shipped to ESTEC, the AMS-02 was exposed to high-energy particles at CERN (protons, electrons, photons) to calibrate the performance of the various sub-detectors and, most importantly, the entire spectrometer. The superconducting magnet operated smoothly at 400 amps. All detectors showed excellent results.

ESTEC planned to conduct two types of tests: EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) to ensure that the payload and the International Space Station (ISS) are compatible in terms of emitting and receiving electromagnetic radiation, and TVT (thermal vacuum testing) to verify the complex thermal behavior of the spectrometer in the extreme temperatures of space. In particular, the TVT tests will provide a measurement of the thermal load on the superconducting magnet, which is an extremely important parameter for determining the magnet’s endurance in the rather warm environment of the ISS.