Millard County to get observatory

University of Utah officials announced Monday that a $17 million to $18 million cosmic ray observatory will be built in Millard County starting this spring.

The sprawling observatory will have detectors dotted across about 250 square miles of desert, rangeland and wetland. Its purpose is to discover secrets to mysterious, high-energy particles that bombard Earth, reconciling differing findings that have been recorded in Japan and Utah.

The "Telescope Array" will be funded largely by Japanese institutions. Utah officials will lease state land for some of the project and the U. will shift existing detectors from northern to central Utah. Other parts of the project will be on federal and private land.

Cosmic rays are tiny bits of material hurled through space by forces that are not fully understood. A detector in Japan, AGASA, has noted more high-energy cosmic rays than an observatory operated by the U. and others on Dugway Proving Ground west of Salt Lake City.

The existing Utah facility, the High-Resolution Fly's Eye cosmic ray observatory (Hi-Res for short), should move its operations to the Millard County desert in about three years.

AGASA has operated for 10 years but will close next year because of clouds, humidity and air pollution, say U. officials. The Japanese observatory will shift to Utah, where AGASA researchers will be joined by scientists from the Universities of Utah, New Mexico, Montana and possibly others.

Japanese experts joining the project are from the Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Osaka City University, Chiba University, Shibaura Institute of Technology, the Japanese high energy acceleration research group known as KEK, Kinki University, Saitama University and Yamanashi University, according to a university statement.

"Right now, the Japanese side has got its $12 million committed, so that's a sure thing," said Pierre Sokolsky, one of the project's scientists and chairman of the U.'s physics department. The money is committed and must be spent on schedule, he added. "The project has to be completed in four years."

Researchers plan to approach funding agencies in Washington in a year, seeking another $5 million or $6 million, he said.