Carrying a VR camera made of 16 GoPros and a 40 pound battery pack 6,800 feet underground in a dark mine elevator wasn’t how I’d anticipated spending last Thanksgiving, but this is just what happens when you’re hanging out with Motherboard’s Canada editor Kate Lunau. Thankfully, the payoff was visiting one of the coolest labs on Earth—or, perhaps better put, under the Earth.
Earlier this week we published a video about SNOLAB, an ultra-clean, high-tech laboratory in northern Ontario. It’s located inside a working nickel mine, which makes it a great place to look for mysterious subatomic particles like neutrinos and dark matter—all the rock overhead shields its experiments from the interference of cosmic rays from space.
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Few people get to ever visit SNOLAB, so I hoped a VR field trip would be a close analog. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to leave a mile-long, dimly-lit mineshaft, shower off with a bunch of remarkable physicists, and enter the gleaming facility, which has to be kept cleaner than an operating room in order to prevent dust from futzing with SNOLAB’s incredibly sensitive particle detectors. But strolling through its white tunnels, it’s what I’d imagine entering a space station would be like.
Source: Motherboard Vice