The United States’ Department of Energy has posted a video to show the construction of an incredibly large neutrino detector.

The Department of Energy’s ‘Fermilab’ is working on the immense device to find out how uncharged subatomic neutrinos can blast through the earth unimpeded. A detector placed in Minnesota will capture neutrinos shot underground from a cannon over 800km away.

Neutrinos generated at a particle accelerator in Illinois will be flung 804.7 kilometres through the earth at around 9.7 kilometres below the surface, reaching the Minnesota-based detector in about 3 milliseconds.

The detector is made up of over 300,000 individual detecting cells, the massive array is necessary to catch all the flying neutrinos, the beam of which flares from just a few metres wide to a few kilometres by the time it reaches the detector.

Researchers on the project want to know how neutrinos change in their travels.

Interestingly, a lot of the work on the next generation neutrino experiment has been performed by students from the University of Minnesota, likely one of the biggest and most intense academic assignments in recent times.

Check out the following video to see the big dish come to life;