During the past two years drastic changes have taken place at the 4,850 ft. level at the Sanford underground lab.
"It's been a work in progress here, and our main priority is keeping everyone safe, so it's been a great improvement," said Lab Supervisor Connie Giroux.
Giroux works at the underground lab's Ross Campus, a research area where scientists use acids and pure copper nuggets to study free from surface cosmic rays.
What used to be an old mine shaft is now a full fledged research center with secure sterilized structures, air conditioning, and reinforced concrete walls.
"It's great to see changes, to see an actual lab environment," Giroux said.
"It was completely different," said Science Liaison Jaret Heise. "You would have been hard-pressed to convince yourself you could do any sort of physics, clean physics no less. It just transformed magically almost."
Heise takes care of all the logistical issues that come with operating a scientific laboratory 5,000 feet below the surface.
For Heise and other underground lab operators, the Ross Campus is just the beginning. A little more than a half mile through winding tunnels, crews are finishing excavating for a new campus, but getting there requires traveling through a construction zone.
"The area we're in right now is fairly clean, but to get to some of these areas, we have to walk through the natural environment of the mine, which is quite dirty," Heise said.
Heise says the new area named the Davis Campus will be a cutting edge research center for scientist looking to study dark matter and neutrinos.
Eighteen-thousand tons of rock have been excavated out of the 7,000 square foot Davis Campus cavern, and Giroux says having a larger research area is hard to picture.
"It will be similar to (Ross Campus), but until you actually see it, it's hard to imagine how it will turn out," Giroux said.
The project is scheduled to be completed by early next year.
The Sanford Underground Lab is also conducting their annual Neutrino Day at the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake next month.
Events begin on Thursday, July 7, with a Science Café Social Hour from 5 p.m. to
6:30 p.m. at The Roundhouse in Lead.
The gathering, sponsored by the Lead Chamber of Commerce, includes a wine and hors d'oeuvres bar ($15 cover), followed by the SDPB Science Café.
The Science Café, beginning at 6:30 p.m., heads for outer space, featuring
Thomas Durkin, Deputy Director of the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium at the
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. He will talk about the end of the space
shuttle program – the last launch is planned for the next day – and what the future holds
for space exploration. The Science Café program is free.
On Friday, July 8, SDPB Radio goes almost a mile underground to present an
exciting one-hour Innovation, at Noon (11 MDT) featuring Sanford Lab researchers
working 4,850 feet below the surface.
On Saturday, July 9, the Sanford Underground Laboratory presents Neutrino Day, a free Saturday morning science festival that celebrates new experiments being installed 4,850 feet underground in the former Homestake gold mine, where Nobel Prizewinning neutrino research was done from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Visitors can talk live, via the Sanford Lab's high-definition videoconference system, with scientists working a mile underground.
A work area in the Ross Campus at the 4850 level.
Scientist work with copper at the Ross Campus lab.
Construction supplies stored in a wide cavern.
Rock being excavated from the new Davis Campus.
Packing into the lift going down into the mine.
