Bringing AMS home
After AMS runs out of helium to cool the magnet, the Space Shuttle will bring it back to Earth. Certainly it will be a bit worse for wear! The electronics will be a bit radiation-damaged, some phototubes will have failed, a few tubes in the TRD will have sparked and died. Rather than repairing it immediately, we will stick AMS back into the test beams, and recalibrate it all over again. The new testbeam data will help us understand how AMS has aged, and we will use this knowledge to do more accurate analyses of our data. The data analysis will or course take many years.
What happens to AMS afterwards? Well, perhaps we may repair it, improve it, and send it back into space! Perhaps we will dismantle it, and its components will become spare parts, classroom aids, and museum exhibits at labs around the world. (This is what happened to the AMS prototype - MIT undergraduates are using its time-of-flight components in their junior physics lab!)
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