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KATRIN is much like AC/DCs Rosie:

She ain’t exactly pretty
She ain’t exactly small

But KATRIN is a gigantic spectrometer, so she can be forgiven for that. On Saturday, she finished her trip and arrived at FZK, a large research centre in Karlsruhe (where I happen to work as well). She is the centerpiece of a experiment that will try to determine the neutrino mass - the KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino experiment. I’ll save the physics for a Machines of Physics entry, but let’s just say that the experiment will measure the energy of a beta electron from a tritium decay with unpreceded sensibility to determine the missing energy - which corresponds to the neutrino mass. Here is the official site of the experiment.. You can also find the way the main spectrometer took on the page “Main Spectrometer Status and Schedule“. The chamber was built only some 400km away from Karlsruhe, but had to be shipped around Europe on a 9000km trip because it was too big and heavy for roads! On Saturday, it finally was brought from the Karlsruhe harbour to the FZK. This page has pictures of the transport, with the narrowest passage through a village left only 2cm of space to the buildings!
Here’s a picture I took today of the chamber waiting for the last transport to the experimental hall, where it will be installed on Wednesday: