12 September 2021 – there has been good progress in the operation so far!
The two cable reels are also deployed. The cables for connecting four detection units are already layed on the sea bottom and connected to the junction box. There is only one cable left to install.
While proceeding with these activities, however, the weather conditions worsened. The sky was still sunny, but waves mounted high: “We have a lot of sun here, but we are dancing a lot” commented Daniele Vivolo, who is among the KM3NeT team onboard the ship.
In such situation the risks when putting the equipment in water increase significantly. It was therefore decided to put the operation on hold, waiting for an improvement of the sea state.
In late afternoon, the sea had calmed down significantly, and the operations were resumed.
As we write this post, the first detection unit of the set of five included in this campaign is already in water, travelling into the deep, dark sea, down to 3,500 meters depth. There it will meet the ROV (the submarine vehicle operated from the ship), which will take care of the next steps: to assist in carefully positioning the detection unit on the sea bottom and to connect it to the cable already in place. Have a safe trip!
In the movie: the first detection unit is prepared for deployment.
11 September 2021 – operations are proceeding smoothly on Handin Tide.
The two new optical beacons of the positioning system are already placed on the sea bottom – these are autonomous devices not requiring a connection to the sea-floor network.
The deployment of the two reels carrying the long interlink cables for the detection units is proceeding. Installation of these cables requires time, because once a reel has reached the sea bottom, each cable has to be spooled off and layed down on the sea floor. These cables will be later used for connecting each detection unit to the submarine junction box which is already at the site (and connected to the 6 detection units already installed).
Once installation of the cables is completed, the deployment of the detection units can start – tomorrow!
The deck of the Handin Tide at the start of the operations (note that the yellow vehicle on the left is the Remotely Operated Vehicle – ROV – to be used for underwater operations).
10 September 2021 – In the evening of September 10, five new detection units of KM3NeT, onboard the Handin Tide, will sail from Malta headed to the KM3NeT/ARCA detection site. This site is located 80 km off the coast of Capo Passero, Sicily (Italy). During a 1-week operation, the detection units will be deployed and connected to the ARCA neutrino telescope at 3,500 m depth, adding up to the six already in operation.
The expectation is high for this new, important step in the construction of KM3NeT. Despite the pandemic, the Collaboration has worked hard to keep the high integration speed needed for such an ambitious project. The detection units include components prepared in various European laboratories, and also the integration, testing and installation of the units on their deployment vehicles was a joint effort of many different KM3NeT teams.
As we write this note, the detection units are safely restrained on the deck of Handin Tide, the ship crew and the KM3NeT offshore team are onboard and ready, and the ship is about to set sail. Onshore, everything is ready in the control station in Portopalo di Capo Passero. The motivation, everywhere, is very high.
We look forward to several days packed with hard work and documented with extraordinary images from the sea surface and the deep sea.
Follow the action while it takes place through our social media channels and our ARCA-blog!
The detection units awaiting deployment on the deck of Handin Tide. Note that the equipment has been already prepared in the order in which it will be moved off the ship: first, two tripods carrying an acoustic beacon each (partially visible in the picture) for the acoustic positioning system, then the reels carrying long cables for connection to the existing submarine network on the sea floor, then the detection units.
A few weeks ago, KM3NeT held its two-week long spring meeting, once again virtually, like almost all meetings nowadays.
With twelve detection units operating in the ARCA and ORCA detectors, it was a joy to discuss the progress of the data analysis groups and prepare for the reports at the summer conferences. With our smooth network of almost twenty production sites new detection units are being prepared at the maximum speed that the COVID-19 restrictions allow. New deployment campaigns are in preparation.
Although at a distance, we felt close to each other thanks to the virtual coffee breaks in the gather town set up by our colleagues of Laboratoire de Physique Corpusculaire de Caen (many thanks!). We concluded the meeting with an exciting quest to fix the unexpected problems found in a virtual shift room: this was a run against the clock to find out the password to get free from the locked room and reconvene for a final party at the bottom of the sea – real shifts won’t ever be so hilarious!
As usual, the meeting was also the occasion to welcome the many newcomers and to remind the accomplishments of those that are leaving the collaboration for a next step in their professional career. Thanks a lot for your work for KM3NeT. We wish you all the best and success in your new working environment!
We sincerely congratulate Diego Real whose PhD thesis was recently awarded an important prize of the Spanish Society of Astronomy!
We were pleased to welcome new teams from the University of Toulon and Institut de Ciències del Mar in Barcelona – both aim at new investigations in the deep-sea environment and have already collaborated with the ANTARES telescope and the NEMO pilot project in the Mediterranean.
Among the new activities announced at the meeting: an Open Science Committee has been established, while the representatives of our early-career-scientists put forward a plan for making the life of our youngest collaborators easier even in these difficult times.
It was a fruitful and pleasant meeting!
The call for an institute to organise the next Collaboration meeting in the fall has been opened – hopefully the next meeting will be in person?
15 April 2021 – During the last few weeks – despite the pandemic – the KM3NeT Collaboration worked hard to make five new detection units for ARCA ready for deployment. Spooled on their launching vehicles they arrived at the harbour of Malta where a team of KM3NeT technicians, engineers, and scientists inspected thoroughly the units for the last time before they were loaded onto the Miss Marilene Tide of the FUGRO company. In the early morning of 8th April the ship sailed out toward the IDMAR site of ARCA near Sicily for an amazing sea operation. After installing several new components for the seafloor network, on Monday 12 April the deployment of the five new detection units began.
Detection unit approaching touch down at the seabed, 3500 m deep.
Junction box at the seabed with the plugs of five detection units.
Located in the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of 3,500 m about 80 km offshore Capo Passero, Sicily, the ARCA telescope together with its sister telescope ORCA, located offshore Toulon, France will allow scientists to identify the sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos emanating from cataclysmic events in the Universe and to study the fundamental properties of the elusive neutrino.
Once complete, the KM3NeT/ARCA detector will form an array of more than two hundred detection units. Each of the 700 m tall units comprises 18 optical modules equipped with ultra-sensitive light sensors that register the faint flashes of light generated by neutrino interactions in the pitch-black abyss of the Mediterranean Sea.
The journey of our new detection units started earlier this month where, after being assembled and prepared for deployment, they left the labs in Catania and Naples on the ferry for Malta. The detection units represent the output of a construction effort distributed over many institutes of the Collaboration.
It took only two days to deploy, test and connect the five new units to the seafloor network. They add to the first detection unit of the apparatus, deployed as early as 2015. In the control room in Capo Passero the first data after connection were recorded immediately. An amazing sea operation came thus to an end, marking a big step for KM3NeT, which is operating now with six detection units in ARCA and also six at ORCA. KM3NeT is now ready to sustain mass construction of the apparatuses at the two sites.
Stay tuned: next sea campaigns for ARCA and ORCA are planned in a few months!
The five detection units of KM3NeT onboard the deployment ship.
Control of the operation from the shore laboratory in Portopalo di Capo Passero (the operation was performed in full respect of the anti-COVID-19 safety measures).
During a week-long sea campaign, 8-14 April 2021, the seafloor infrastructure offshore Sicily has been successfully upgraded. In addition, five new detection units of the kilometre cube neutrino telescope KM3NeT/ARCA have been connected and are operational.
Located in the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of 3500 m, about 80 km offshore Capo Passero, Sicily, the ARCA telescope together with its sister detector ORCA, located offshore Toulon, France will allow scientists to identify the astrophysical sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos and to study the fundamental properties of the neutrinos, the most elusive and pervasive of the known elementary particles. The two detectors will also provide unprecedented opportunities for Earth and Sea science studies.
Once complete, the KM3NeT/ARCA detector will form an array of more than two hundred detection units. Each of these 700 m tall structures comprises 18 modules equipped with ultra-sensitive light sensors that register the faint flashes of light generated by neutrino interactions in the pitch-black abyss of the Mediterranean Sea.
During the first part of the sea operation, a new junction box, a hub for the power distribution and data transmission of the detection units, was added to the sea floor infrastructure. The junction box is connected via an electro-optical cable to the recently renovated onshore INFN laboratory located in Portopalo di Capo Passero. In the second part of the operation, five new KM3NeT detection units were deployed, individually connected by a remotely operated submersible to the junction box and unfurled to their final vertical configuration.
As a final step, the first detection unit of the apparatus, which had been deployed as early as 2015, was connected to the new junction box.In total, six detection units are now in operation, representing the initial core of the KM3NeT/ARCA neutrino telescope. With the six ORCA detection units already taking data, the KM3NeT neutrino observatory has now comparable sensitivity to that of its
predecessor, the ANTARES neutrino telescope.
KM3NeT is an international collaboration of over 250 scientists from more than fifty scientific institutes around the World. KM3NeT has been included in the list of high priority projects selected by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).
Paschal Coyle, Spokesperson of the Collaboration emphasises: “The successful deployment and operation of multiple ARCA detection units is another major step forward for the KM3NeT project. Now it’s full steam ahead with the construction of the hundreds of detection units to be deployed at the French and Italian sites.”
The activities in Italy are supported by the Sicilian Region in the framework of the IDMAR project. The goal of IDMAR is to upgrade the sea research infrastructures in Sicily, including the KM3NeT/ARCA site.
“This campaign demonstrates once again the technological capabilities of KM3NeT and IDMAR to manage such complex marine operations”, says Giacomo Cuttone, Scientific Director of the IDMAR project.
PICTURES
The five detection units of KM3NeT onboard the deployment ship.
Preparation of a detection unit for deployment.
Deployment of the new junction box for the sea floor infrastructure.
Deployment of a detection unit of KM3NeT.
One of the detection units of KM3NeT reaching the sea floor.
Connections on the submarine junction box (3,500 m depth).
Control of the operation from the shore laboratory in Portopalo di Capo Passero (the
operation was performed in full respect of the anti-COVID-19 safety measures).
END of PRESS RELEASE
For editors, not for publication.
Additional information:
ARCA-Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss
ORCA-Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss
KM3NeTneutrino Youtube channel:
Link to a video of the overboarding of the junction box (aerial view):
Link to a video of the overboarding of a detection unit:
Contact:
Paschal Coyle, Spokesperson of the KM3NeT Collaboration (coyle@cppm.in2p3.fr)
Giacomo Cuttone, Scientific Director of the IDMAR project (cuttone@lns.infn.it)
21 December 2020 – Just in time for the winter break, a nice Christmas present was delivered to KM3NeT: the second main cable between the ARCA detector site and the shore station in the lovely village of Porto Palo di Capo Passero at the isle of Sicily, Italy has been installed. It is an important step in the program of upgrading the ARCA seafloor network for the ARCA detector near Sicily, Italy.
19 August 2019 – Since this spring, the KM3NeT telescopes are routinely operating with five detection units: four at the ORCA site, one at the ARCA site. First data results have been reported on the international conferences and workshops.
For the ORCA detector, off shore the French Provencal coast, four units were installed and connected to the seabed network. An earlier deployed unit was damaged during inspection and had to be recovered for repair in the labs of the Collaboration. It will be re-deployed in a next sea campaign. Also during the Spring-campaigns, three autonomous acoustic beacons were deployed at the seabed in the vicinity of the ORCA array. They are used for acoustic positioning of the optical modules in the detection units that move with the slowly varying deep sea currents. Sea campaigns for further expansion of the ORCA detector are scheduled after the summer break.
Offshore Sicily at the site of ARCA, after a fix of the seabed network, a detection unit that was deployed three years ago, could be revived and is again taking data since. Currently, the seabed network is being re-designed to allow for the extension of the ARCA detector to more than 200 detector units. The successful though temporary fix of the existing network makes connection of more detection units possible, while waiting for the implementation of the upgraded network.
Differences between ARCA and ORCA
The technology used for the ARCA and ORCA detectors is almost identical, but the difference in volume and height of the detectors and the density of optical modules in the detectors are strikingly different. When finished, the volume of ARCA will be more than 100 times larger then that of ORCA. ARCA will have a volume of about 1 Gton and ORCA ‘only’ about 8 Mton, while the number of optical modules in ARCA will only be twice that of ORCA: about 4000 vs about 2000. Consequently, module density in ORCA will be about five times larger than that in ARCA. How is that achieved? In both detectors, eighteen optical modules are attached to each vertical detection unit. In ARCA, the distance between the lowest and the highest module is about 600. In ORCA this is about 150 m. Also the horizontal spacing between detection units is different: about 90 m in ARCA vs about 20 m in ORCA. Although, ARCA will have only twice the number of detection units, its foot print on the sea bed is much larger that that of ORCA.
The geometrical differences reflect the main scientific purpose for which the detectors will be used. These are also visible in the first character of their names: ARCA stands for ‘Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss’. The sparsely instrumented detector is optimised for the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos from distant sources in the Universe. ORCA is the acronym for ‘Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss’. The more densily instrumented detector is optimised to measure lower energy neutrinos, thus providing data for the study of neutrinos oscillating between the three known neutrino flavours. The words ‘in the Abyss’ refer to the locations of the detectors several kilometres deep in the Mediterranean Sea.
KM3NeT: Comparison of the physical size of the ARCA and ORCA detectors.
16 May 2016 – During a five day sea campaign last week, two detection units for ARCA were deployed at the Italian KM3NeT site. On board the Ambrosius Tide, the detection units arrived from the harbour of Malta at the KM3NeT-It site, 80 km off-shore the South-East of Sicily. After a survey of the area and inspection of the deep-sea infrastructure, the units were deployed at their pre-defined locations. With a speed of about 12 meter per minute, the descent of a unit from the sea surface to touch-down at a depth of 3500 meter took about 4.5 hours. Read more
