Measurements of the proton and helium spectra from CREAM-V

Abstract

The Cosmic Rays Energy And Mass (CREAM) balloon payload directly measures the composition and elemental spectra of cosmic rays in the upper stratosphere. It is designed to probe the acceleration mechanism and propagation history of cosmic rays at energies from 1012 up to 1015 eV. Being the fifth flight in a series of seven, CREAM-V took data above Antarctica for 39 days from December 1st 2009 to January 8th 2010. The instrument comprises a tungsten/scintillating fiber calorimeter using graphite as a target for the energy measurement which had been calibrated at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The charge measurement of the incident particles is performed by means of a Silicon Charge Detector (SCD), a Cherenkov Detector, a Cherenkov Camera (CherCam) and a Timing Charge Detector (TCD). In this paper we present results from the on-going data analysis and compare them to data collected by the previous CREAM-III flight.