Progress report on the Heavy Ions in Space (HIIS) experiment

One of the objectives of the Heavy Ions In Space (HIIS) experiment is to investigate heavy ions which appear at Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) below the geomagnetic cutoff for fully-ionized galactic cosmic rays. Possible sources of such 'below-cutoff' particles are partially-ionized solar energetic particles, the anomalous component of cosmic rays, and magnetospherically-trapped particles. In recent years, there have also been reports of below-cutoff ions which do not appear to be from any known source. Although most of these observations are based on only a handful of ions, they have led to speculation about 'partially-ionized galactic cosmic rays' and 'near-by cosmic ray sources'. The collecting power of HIIS is order of magnitude larger than that of the instruments which reported these results, so HIIS should be able to confirm these observations and perhaps discover the source of these particles. Preliminary results on below-cutoff heavy-ions are reported. Observations to possible known sources of such ions are compared. A second objective of the HIIS experiment is to measure the elemental composition of ultraheavy galactic cosmic rays, beginning in the tin-barium region of the periodic table. A report on the status of this analysis is presented.