The humongous electromagnet has finally reached its destination after travelling through water and roads, throwing a spectacular show for viewers. The magnet garnered itself a lot of fan following on Twitter (#bigmove) covering a safe 3,200 mile journey. The 50-foot-wide, 15-ton electromagnet became a sensation while making a move from the national laboratory in Brookhaven, New York to Fermilab in Batavia, Ill, Friday night.
The giant magnet's arrival was welcomed by the new home crowd. A 15-hour drive-down from New York to Illinois, took a month for the giant magnet, considering the safety of the $30 million gadget. It traveled down the East Coast, through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, by ship. It was then towed into a custom-made 16-axel flatbed truck, which was designed to travel at an average speed of 10 miles per hour, to cover its final leg of the journey.
The truck displayed a huge board "Driving discovery in particle physics" to hint the puzzled onlookers. It mostly traveled through the night to avoid traffic and remained parked during the day. The hard work and the duration of the journey finally paid off when the massive magnet reached with no damage. Even if about an eighth of an inch of the magnet was twisted or taken apart, it would be nothing but an over sizednon-functional object.
"The whole thing went as smoothly as we could have wanted it to," Fermilab spokesman Andre Salles, who was among the magnet's traveling companions for about 10 days of the trip, told Washington Post.
The whole travel operation was pre-planned and executed by Emmert International. Terry Emmert, President of Emmert International said that everything went as planned.
"There's a lot of areas that we had planned to have very, very snug fits and everything went as planned, everything was laid out perfect, everything had a backup plan and the execution was perfect on everybody's part," he said.
The giant magnet will be used by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory officials to study super-fast subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second. The success of the experiment called Muon g-2 will lead to new discoveries in the field of particle physics.
The huge magnet was built in the 1990s by the scientists at the Brookhaven National Lab. Since the scientists did not need the magnet for further experiments, they shipped it to the Midwest for $3 million. The cost to build a new electromagnet would take as much as $30 million, Chris Polly, manager of the Muon g-2 project at Fermilab, said.
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