ESA team at beamline

An ESA-led group subjected components and space equipment to the most intense beam of ultra-high energy heavy ions available – short of travelling into space – during a week-long visit to CERN during the last week of November 2017. Test items were placed in a path of this experimental beamline fed by the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) particle accelerator. Located in a circular tunnel nearly 7 km in circumference, the SPS is CERN’s second largest accelerator after the Large Hadron Collider, which the SPS feeds into in turn.