Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 17:44
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IceCube: In-ice Antarctic Telescope

My question is what are you guys going to do with the data you find? How will this contribute to the world and the everyday person who knows little about these neutrinos? Also, how long will it take to collect enough data?

Fri, 12/04/2009 - 11:10

Casey OHara

Excellent questions, and I get asked these a lot! 
First off, what do we do with the data?  The data is made available to scientists all over the world, who study it for different reasons.  The main idea of IceCube is to make a map of the universe based on where neutrinos come from.  It's kind of like a star map except instead of visible stars, we look for neutrinos. But other scientists might study how neutrinos interact with the atmosphere, or even things like how the ice itself is moving, to help understand glaciers.
The IceCube telescope is supposed to gather data for 20 years after it is finished (in 2011) but I would not be surprised to see them continue to gather data much longer than that.  Each day, the telescope will detect a few hundred neutrino interactions, so over the course of 20 years that's a lot of neutrinos!
How will this contribute to the world and the everyday person?  That's an important question for science.  Often, science is done not to find some use or application, but just to seek knowledge and understanding about the world.  IceCube is like this - there is no foreseeable "use" for neutrinos, but we are using them to learn about the universe to help us understand.  Maybe some day we will discover a way to use them, but that's not really the point of IceCube.
One other thing to consider, though, is that often these huge scientific endeavors give us unexpected benefits.  For example, in Europe, at CERN (European nuclear research center), a scientist figured out how to link one report to another report to make it easier to find information all over the world; this led to the World Wide Web.