Opens a new window
on our universe
Liveblogs during sea campaigns for ARCA
23 September 2026 – The KM3NeT Collaboration is happy to report about a very successful sea campaign conducted at the KM3NeT ARCA site in the past two weeks. The campaign led to a significant step forward in the construction of the apparatus, including an enlargement of the submarine infrastructure and the detector and an upgrade of its acoustic positioning system. Read more
21 July 2025 – A very successful sea campaign has been conducted at the KM3NeT ARCA site in the past two weeks. During the operation 18 new detection units and a new acoustic long baseline positioning system were installed.
28 October 2024 – The latest sea campaigns at both the KM3NeT’s ARCA and ORCA sites have led to major progress in expanding detector installations and improving calibration systems.
The number of detection units in operation in the deep sea has been increased to 57: 33 in ARCA and 24 in ORCA.
10 October 2023 – An important two-week marine operation has been successfully carried out at the KM3NeT ARCA site, offshore Capo Passero, Sicily in September.
The campaign was performed with the Optimus Prime, equipped with a FUGRO underwater vehicle (ROV). The ship set sail from Malta on Monday, 11 September and came back to the port at the end of the operation on Thursday, 23 September.
22 November 2022 – After 4 years of activities carried out by the Italian funding agency INFN and Alcatel Submarine Networks, part of Nokia, the new subsea network for KM3NeT ARCA, funded under the Idmar regional project in Italy, is now complete.
12 September 2022 – New sea campaigns were performed last week for both ARCA and ORCA. The purpose was to prepare the field for next installation phases of the detectors as well as to deploy new detection units and acoustic beacons – the latter are autonomous calibration devices which run on batteries and need to be replaced after some time.
The number of detection units in operation in the deep sea has been increased to 32 (comprising almost 18,000 photomultipliers): 21 in ARCA and 11 in ORCA.
14 June 2022 – The sea campaign for enlarging the KM3NeT/ARCA submarine telescope has been completed with full success!
During the last few days, all detection units loaded on Handin Tide for the second phase of the operation were carefully installed on the sea bottom. This was achieved at a record-breaking speed, with 7 detection units installed, connected and unfurled in less than 48 hours!
14 June 2022 – The sea campaign for enlarging the KM3NeT/ARCA submarine telescope which was started on June 2, has been completed today with a full success. As a result, data taking with ARCA has been resumed with 19 detection units in operation!
11 June 2022 – Due to the adverse weather conditions of the last days, the schedule of the sea campaign had to be redefined.
Here is the updated plan:
6 June 2022 – The first round of activities of the ongoing sea campaign at ARCA has been completed.
In a summary, in the past week-end:
KM3NeT collaboration - All Rights Reserved