NALTA-NALTA stands for "North American Large-scale Time-coincidence Arrays consortium." Along with WALTA, four other different experimental groups make up NALTA. These are ALTA (Alberta Large area Time coincidence Array), CHICOS (California HIgh school Cosmic ray ObServatory), CROP (the Cosmic Ray Observatory Project, located in Nebraska), and SALTA (Snowmass Area Large-scale Time coincidence Array, located in Colorado). The NALTA website has links to these sites and a few others.
ALTA-The Alberta Large-scale Time-coincidence Array was the first cosmic ray detection project of its kind that worked in cooperation with local high schools, involving high school students and teachers. ALTA is very similar to WALTA, but located in Alberta as opposed to Washington.
CHICOS-The California HIgh school Cosmic ray ObServatory is a project similar to WALTA that is located in the Los Angeles area. The website is very well organized and has a lot of neat pictures of what they do. They hope to involve 10,000 high school students and 300 high school teachers in this program.
CROP-The Cosmic Ray Observatory Project is another project similar to WALTA, but in this case located in Nebraska. The website has just recently been put up (as of 6/23/02), so there is not much to see beyond the project description at this point.
SALTA-The Snowmass Area Large-scale Time-coincidence Array is a similar project to WALTA, except that it is located in Colorado. The website has some cool information, particularly on the reenactment of Victor Hess's 1911-1912 balloon flights, involving WALTA's very own Professor Jeff Wilkes and former graduate student Heather Zorn.
Quarknet-Quarknet, with headquarters at Fermilab, is a program that involves high school students and teachers in current physics research. They have provided substantial support for the WALTA project. Quarknet programs are under way in many places; some are linked below:
Fermilab-FermiLab is the world's premier high energy physics research lab, located in Chicago. They have been strong supporters of the WALTA program and their website contains many interesting links.
Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium-The Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium connects NASA with Washington residents. They provide grants, scholarships, and research opportunities and work with universities within Washington state.
VASE-The Vijlen Air Shower Experiment is an experiment located in the Netherlands that uses the water Cerenkov technique in cosmic ray detection.
NAHSA - the Nijmegen Area High School Array. Nahsa is a collaboration between the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands and high schools in the Nijmegen area.
Sky-View - a consortium of
school-net sites in Germany: "Die gut geeignete Infrastruktur an den
Schulen in den Ballungszentren Nordrhein-Westfalens soll genutzt
werden, um Schülern die Naturwissenschaften zu begeistern und gleichzeitig eine Nachweisanlage für hochenergetische Teilchen aus dem Kosmos
aufzubauen."
The Pierre Auger Project-The Pierre Auger Project is unique in that it plans to detect cosmic rays in both the Northern Hemisphere (Utah) and the Southern Hemisphere (Argentina). The observatories are still being constructed and it may be several years before data can be collected.
CASA-The Chicago Air Shower Array was a Utah-based project designed to detect high energy cosmic rays. It operated from 1990 to 1997, but is currently no longer in operation. The scintillator plates and photomultiplier tubes used in the WALTA project were taken from the CASA project.
The High Resolution Fly's Eye - High-Res is the successor to the Fly's Eye, one of the longer-running cosmic ray detection experiments, based at the University of Utah. The history of the project is particularly interesting, especially in considering differences between the WALTA detectors and the Fly's Eye detectors.
Milagro - Located near Los Alamos National Lab, Milagro is a large water Cherenkov detector optimized for the study of air showers produced by TeV energy gamma rays.
Cosmic Ray, Gamma Ray, Neutrino and Other Experiments-This website has a list of links to a multitude of different experiments being done around the world relating to cosmic ray, gamma ray, and neutrino research.
updated 08/07/2002