Gus Sinnis was pleasantly surprised when he and his colleagues got the High Resolution Fly’s Eye purring this past May. They’d never touched the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray detector before, and it had been collecting dust for nearly eight months ever since heightened security after last September’s terrorist attacks stopped the experiment dead in its tracks.
The new security measures banished the university scientists who run HiRes from their experiment, which sits on two hills on the US Army Dugway Proving Ground in western Utah. The site is for testing equipment to protect US forces against biological and chemical attacks. Ironically, one reason scientists chose to build HiRes and its predecessors at Dugway was because the army base offered protection against vandalism.
With binocular vision from two arrays of mirrors separated by about 12 km, HiRes scours the atmosphere for fluorescence flashes caused by impinging cosmic rays with energies of 1017...