HiSCORE is a collaboration between three institutes in Russia - the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Irkutsk State University in Siberia and Lomonosov Moscow State University - as well as DESY, the University of Hamburg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, all in Germany. The unprecedented size of the array will allow scientists to investigate cosmic rays within an energy range of 100 TeV to 1 EeV - a relatively unexplored region.

HiSCORE's detectors are designed to observe the radiation created when cosmic rays hit the Earth's upper atmosphere. This causes a shower of secondary particles that travel faster than the speed of light in air, producing Cherenkov radiation in the process that can be picked up by HiSCORE's photomultiplier tubes. This radiation can be used to determine the source and intensity of cosmic rays as well as to investigate the properties of high-energy astronomical objects that emit gamma rays, such as supernova remnants and blazars.