THE SuperTIGER Instrument: Measurement of Elemental Abundances of Ultra-Heavy Galactic Cosmic Rays

The SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument was developed to measure the abundances of galactic cosmic-ray elements from Ne-10 to Zr-40 with individual element resolution and the high statistics needed to test models of cosmic-ray origins. SuperTIGER also makes exploratory measurements of the abundances of elements with 40 or = 10, including approx.1300 with Z > 29 and approx.60 with Z > 49. Here, we describe the instrument, the methods of charge identification employed, the SuperTIGER balloon flight, and the instrument performance

The ACE-CRIS Scintillating Optical Fiber Trajectory (SOFT) Detector: Calibrations at the NSCL and GSI

The Scintillating Optical Fiber Trajectory (SOFT) detector, the hodoscope for the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS) on the NASA Advanced Composition Explorer, was calibrated using 155 MeV/n He, Li, C, N, 0, and Ar at the Michigan State University National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), and 200 - 700 MeV/n C, Si, and Fe at the GSI facility in Darrnstadt. Germany. The flight instrument consists of three hodoscope fiber planes and one trigger plane. read out by an image intensified CCD camera system and by intensified photodiodes respectively. The spatial and angular resolution of the hodoscope is described, along with the detection efficiency of both the hodoscope and trigger plane as a function of charge