NASA (i think) are trying to detect antimatter and/or dark matter; if they succeed what would scientists be able to do

Question: NASA (i think) are trying to detect antimatter and/or dark matter; if they succeed what would scientists be able to do
- Keywords:
  antimatter
Asked by crazyscientist96 to Andrew, Janey P, Kinda, Ravi, SarahJane on 20 Jun 2013.
- Andrew Manches answered on 20 Jun 2013:
  
  Not my research, but an interest. The main issue is that it is hard to understand and predict how the universe works when you can only detect a small percentage of it. We can ‘easily’ detect things we can see or detect by bouncing particles off. But with dark matter, it is really hard to detect. When we can, we will be able to understand a lot more about the universe.
- Ravi Kopparapu answered on 20 Jun 2013:
  
  Anti-matter (like positron) has been discovered in the last century. Scientists are attempting to discover ‘Drak-matter’ which constitutes nearly 20% of the Universe. For comparison, ordinary matter (stuff you and I and the stars/planets are made of) is only 5% of the Universe. And ‘Dark *energy* is thought to be the remaining 75% of the Universe. That means, by discovering Dark-matter, we will know what is 20% of the Universe is made of and how it interacts. May be there are some objects that are made of Dark-matter (we don’t know that yet). But it would be one of the most fundamental discoveries of our time.

Question: NASA (i think) are trying to detect antimatter and/or dark matter; if they succeed what would scientists be able to do