The keg, which weighed 200-tons and was contained in a super-oversized barrel-like structure was actually a supersize spectrometer en route to the nearby city of Karlsruhe. There, it will play a critical role in a joint European and American experiment called KATRIN, designed to measure the mass of a neutrino, the elusive “ghost particle”, which is found abundantly throughout the universe.
Although the spectrometer was manufactured just 200 miles from its destination, it was just too big to be transported on the highway and instead it made a two-month journey down the Danube River to the Black Sea, across the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, north to the English Channel, up the Rhine River to Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen (god I hope I never have to type that again), and overland to Karlsruhe. A slow haul for a machine that will detect particles that normally move at nearly the speed of light.
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