Elemental abundances of cosmic rays with Z33 as measured on HEAO-3

The Heavy Nuclei Experiment on HEAO-3 uses a combination of ion chambers and a Cerenkov counter. During analysis, each particle is assigned two parameters Z sub c and Z sub l proportion signal is double valued, a unique assignment of particle charge, Z, is not possible in general. Previous work was limited to particles of either high rigidity or low energy, for which a unique charge assignment was possible, although those subsets contain less than 50% of the total number of particles observed. The use of the maximum likelihood technique to determine abundances for the complete data set from approximately 1.5 to approximately 80 GeV/amu is studied.