Crews with the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead say they’ll undergo the careful process of lowering about 380 steel beams a mile underground soon.
Each beam weighs about 12,800 pounds.
Those beams will support the cryostats that will hold 17,000 tons of liquid argon to measure the oscillations of neutrinos from Chicago.
Jeff Barthel is a rigging specialist for SURF… He helped lower equipment underground for a dark matter experiment a few years ago. During a Deep Talks event last week, he said the scale is much larger, now.
“This experiment is like building an aircraft carrier in a bottle. There aren’t more pieces, but they’re way bigger pieces. If LZ was a stopwatch, this one is Big Ben. It’s just a big, big undertaking.”
The beams are at a staging area in Rapid City.
Officials say crews are still in the process of outfitting the caverns. Once they’re ready, then they’ll start trucking the beams to the lab.
They expect to start lowering the beams to support the DUNE experiment at the start of next year.
