Antarctic Balloon Flight and Data Analysis of TRACER

• Main Authors: A. Romero-wolf, M. Ave, P. Boyle, F. Gahbauer, J. Hör, M. Ichimura, D. Müller, S. Wakely
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.68.4361; http://ik1au1.fzk.de/~joerg/pub/29ICRC3-97.pdf

The TRACER cosmic-ray detector was successfully flown from McMurdo, Antarctica in December 2003. The instrument has a geometric factor of 5 m ¢ ster and provided measurements of cosmic ray nuclei from oxygen to iron (Z=8 to Z=26). The analysis of the data begins with the reconstruction of the trajectory of each nucleus through the instrument. Subsequently, the elemental charge Z and the particle energy are measured from 0.5 to 10,000 GeV/amu. This process uses known response functions and fluctuations in response of the individual detector elements, and the procedures are verified with extensive computer simulations. The analysis is able to cleanly select the very rare events at the highest energies without contamination due to low energy background which is more abundant by about a factor of £ 10 ¤. 1.