Construction and test of a scintillator hodoscope for the CREAM experiment

CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass) is a balloon-borne experiment being prepared for the first flight which is scheduled for the end of 2004 from Antarctica. It is designed to perform direct measurements of cosmic ray composition over the elemental range from proton to iron to the supernova energy scale of 1015 eV in a series of balloon flights using the new Ultra Long Duration Balloon (ULDB) capability under development by NASA. The instrument includes a sampling tungsten/scintillating fiber calorimeter preceded by a graphite target with scintillating fiber hodoscopes, a pixelated silicon charge detector, a transition radiation detector and a segmented timing-based particle-charge detector. The hodoscope system provides track reconstruction capability by means of 4 orthogonal layers of fibers (S0,S1) on top of the carbon target and 2 additional layers (S2) located in between the upper and lower target sections. Its construction technique and beam test results are presented.