Opens a new window
on our universe
Liveblogs during sea campaigns for ORCA.
16 May 2025 – This week at the ORCA site, a sea operation was performed with a twofold purpose: the recovery from the sea bottom of some oceanographic instruments which required some maintenance and the installation of a set of 4 new detection units. The number of detection units in ORCA has thus been increased to 28.
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.
15 June 2024 – A new marine operation took place in the last week for enlarging the ORCA deep-sea neutrino telescope.
Taking advantage of a spot of good weather of 48 hours, four new detection units were added to the apparatus.
1 May 2023 – During a two days sea operation, 27-28 April 2023, three detection units were successfully connected to the ORCA detector of KM3NeT in a record time of just over 24 hours. In addition, an acoustic beacon was recovered for battery replacement. The total number of deployed ORCA units is now 18, as visible in the sonar scan above.
24 April 2023 – Following a successful sea operation, the 16-19 April 2023, a collection of new marine science instrumentation is now connected to the Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Mediterranee (LSPM)) sea floor infrastructure at the KM3NeT/ORCA site, near Toulon, France.
12 December 2022 – During a sea campaign performed last week, ORCA has been enlarged by means of 4 new detection units. This brings the total of detection units deployed in ORCA to 15, comprising more than 7,500 photomultipliers.
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.
22 November 2021 – Four new detection units have been added to ORCA with a 5-day intense and successful sea operation.
22 November 2021 – Excellent progress today, with the work finalized on the two detection units lately deployed: after a confirmation from the tests that both were ok, the unfurling was started of the two units. The launcher vehicles were safely recovered from the Castor; the ROV inspected both units after unfurling, confirming that both are in nominal configuration. A new functionality test was then performed from the shore station to ensure that both detection units work nominally.
21 November 2021 – The weather forecast does not look promising for next days. The main effort today was spent on some tuning of the equipment and preparation to next steps.
KM3NeT collaboration - All Rights Reserved