More than 60 physicists and engineers from six universities and INFN units contributed to the AMS construction and commissioning, development of the data analysis tools and ground segment infrastructures.

Italian researchers, thanks to the support of INFN and ASI, have been responsible for the realization of four out of the five AMS sub-detectors (namely TOF, TRACKER, RICH, ECAL) and for the electronics of the TRD gas control system.  Italian industries developed the thermal control  and power distribution systems, the RICH conical mirror and the silicon sensors for the Tracker system.

Italian effort has continued uninterruptedly along the years in the:

- operation and monitoring of AMS at the CERN POCC;

- calibration and verification of detector performances;

- data analysis and computing support;

- space qualification of the new UTTPS system.

An integral master copy of the AMS-02 data is preserved at the CNAF,  the INFN computing data center where 15k HEP-SPEC06 of CPU and 2Pbyte of disk are available for AMS-02 data processing and Monte Carlo simulation. All public data from AMS-02 are easily retrievable from the ASI Space Science Data Center.

The Milano group (becoming Milano-Bicocca group from 2006) has been part of the AMS project since its beginning, and it is currently supporting data transfer and ground segment (http://ams.mib.infn.it).

Since the installation of AMS-02 on ISS, the Milano-Bicocca group supports data taking in orbit at the CERN POCC,  the data transfer to and from CNAF,  and is active on the data analysis aimed at physics studies.

The science data analysis includes measurements of proton and helium fluxes, anisotropy study of protons, electrons and positrons, the study of time dependent phenomena in galactic cosmic ray fluxes related to long term solar activity, and investigations on solar energetic particles.  

Since the precursor flight in 1998, the group has also developed a tool for tracing cosmic rays in the magnetosphere (www.geomagsphere.org) and a scientific  modeling of the long term solar modulation of galactic cosmic rays (www.helmod.org).

Currently the AMS-02 group in Milano Bicocca University and INFN consists of nine staff members – including permanent, finite term and formally retired (currently, one of them with a research assignment in another National Institution) - and one post-doc fellow.

Former staff & post-doc members of the Milano Bicocca group include: G. Boella^a, C. Consolandi^b, G. Pessina^c, L. Rossi^d, I. Usoskin^e, G. Volpini^d.

^aNow retired

^bNow at AMS Group in Hawaii

^cContributed to TRD preamplifier prototype

^dContributed to superconducting magnet

^eNow at AMS Group in Oulu