| TIGER is a balloon-borne cosmic-ray experiment designed to measure the elemental abundances of Galactic Cosmic Rays with 26 ≤ Z ≤ 40 with better than 0.25 charge unit resolution. The experiment utilizes a combination of plastic scintillators, plastic and aerogel Cherenkov detectors, and scintillating fiber hodoscopes. TIGER was flown from Fort Sumner, NM aboard a high-altitude balloon on September 24, 1997 at geomagnetic cutoffs between 4.2 GV and 3.2 GV and atmospheric depth of 4.1 g/cm2. The 23.5 hour balloon flight provided a statistically significant sample of GCR nuclei up through Ni and has successfully validated the experiment concept. In this thesis I describe the TIGER instrument, balloon flight, and data analysis in detail, and show that TIGER has achieved charge resolution of 0.23 cu for energies between 0.8 GeV/n and 4.3 GeV/n. I also present a new measurement of the elemental abundance of Co/Ni, which is important because it can put limits on the time between nucleosynthesis and acceleration. |
