March 27, 2006 - Brookhaven Fe Run

The CRaTER Science Team spent the weekend at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) testing the response of the instrument model to 1 GeV/nucleon iron.

After a late start, the team saw beam around 3 pm Sunday afternoon. We ran our four detectors in coincidence and with two different TEP configurations, looking at the system response to 1 GeV/nucleon iron (Fe). We were able to see the iron in D1/D3 and also beautiful fragmentation peaks in the thick detector behind the TEP; that will allow us to assess our design very nicely. We also collected track data using the CR-39 samples that NASA/JSC provided us.

We ended the day by having the beam operator take a "ferrograph" of the test set-up, photos of which are linked to the right. He blew the beam up to greater than the size of our test box and then hit the whole area hard with 1 GeV/n iron. They use a large CCD array behind the target to image the shadow. You can see the outline of our detector and the lucite stands it sits on; this verified that we had excellent beam alignment. This activated the box a little, so it was impounded at BNL overnight. We estimate that the "ferrograph" required a few kilorads of radiation.

The bottomline is that we had an excellent run and now have the data that we'll be able to rack up against the model predictions. We look forward to the next run at BNL with our CRaTER E/M unit later this year.