Speaker
Description
The damage due to cosmic rays is a serious concern for astronauts, electronics, and spacecraft. Although the cosmic ray flux is comprised mostly of protons and helium nuclei, there is a non-negligible component comprised of heavy-ions up to and including iron nuclei. The importance of the heavy-ion component is enhanced because the damage due to ionization goes as $Z^2$. In addition to the damage due to primary ionization from a heavy-ion, the damage from secondary production of p, d, t, $^3$He, and $^4$He is also significant. Extensive double differential measurements for light fragment production have been made for projectile energies below 3 GeV/n. Many of these measurements have been made at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NRSL), which uses beams extracted from the Booster synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). No light nucleus production data exist for heavy-ion projectile energies from 3-50 GeV/n. The Space Radiation Protection community has identified this high energy regime as an area of need. Both cross section data and models to describe those data are needed. Although several facilities that could produce heavy-ion beams in this high energy range are either under construction or planned, FAIR at GSI, NICA at Dubna, and an ion driver at JPARC, currently the only facilities that can address the needs in this high energy range are the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN (13-200 GeV/n) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL (3-125 GeV/n). Although RHIC is a collider, the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment has installed a fixed-target and the Collider Accelerator Division (CAD) has developed an efficient conduct of operations to deliver ion beams to the target. In the past few years, the RHIC/STAR fixed-target program has completed an energy scan with gold projectiles from 3 to 100 GeV/n on a gold foil target. Although gold ion beams are not relevant for space radiation concerns, these measurements demonstrate the capabilities of the STAR detector to make the light nucleus production cross section measurements using particle identification with both ionization density ($dE/dx$) and time-of-fight (TOF). RHIC is a flexible facility and can deliver the ion beam species (He, C, Si, Fe) and energies (3-125 GeV/n) of need to the Space Radiation Community. STAR can install the targets of interest (C, Al, Fe) and can make the necessary light nucleus production cross section measurements. This talk will discuss the prospects for making these measurements during the RHIC ion beam running periods from 2023-2025.