Rutherford Appleton Laboratory - Programmes

Programmes

In addition to hosting facilities for the UK, RAL also operates departments to co-ordinate the UK programme of participation in major international facilities. The largest of these are the areas of particle physics, and space science.

In particle physics the largest international project is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but RAL has a major role in the UK participation in several other projects such as:

• the MINOS — Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search,
• the T2K — to measure the third type of neutrino oscillation,
• experiments to measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron at the Institut Laue–Langevin,
• International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment,
• the UK Dark Matter Collaboration experiment at the Boulby Mine in Yorkshire.

In space science, RAL builds components for, and tests satellites, as well as receiving, analysing and curating the data collected by those spacecraft. Satellite missions in which RAL has a significant role include:

• the STEREO Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory,
• the SOHO Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,
• Solar-B investigating the Solar Corona,
• Galileo European satellite navigation system,
• MSG-2 meteorological satellite,
• Venus Express investigating the atmosphere of Venus,
• TopSat taking high resolution pictures of the Earth,
• Double Star (Polar) investigating the interaction of the Earth and the Sun,
• EOS-Aura monitoring the global temperature of the Earth's atmosphere,
• Rosetta (spacecraft) investigating the composition of comets,
• Chandrayaan-1 mission to investigate the moon,
• Herschel Space Observatory and Planck (spacecraft) space telescope.
• Badr-B, developed the CCD cameras for the satellite.