High energy cosmic rays, amongst the most perplexing objects in astrophysics, have energies upto a hundred billion billion electron volts (a proton's mass is only a billion electron volts). There is no known mechanism which can explain the acceleration of particles to such high energies. To study these mysterious particles, a team of researchers have proposed a detector which will consist of thou- sands of swimming pool-sized water tanks with associated electronics. Researchers are hopeful of a multinational collaboration for the US $100 million project (Science, Vol 269, September 1, 1995).
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