RELATIVE ABUNDANCES OF SECONDARY AND PRIMARY COSMIC-RAYS AT HIGH-ENERGIES

We describe new results on the energy spectra of the cosmic-ray nuclei boron, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen up to energies around 1 TeV per amu. The measurements were performed on the Spacelab 2 mission of the Space Shuttle in 1985. Carbon and oxygen are essentially primary cosmic rays, while boron is purely secondary, and nitrogen has secondary as well as primary contributions. Therefore, the relative abundances of these nuclei provide sensitive information on the propagation of cosmic rays through the Galaxy. We find that the flux of the secondary cosmic rays continues to decrease relative to that of the primaries over the energy range covered with this observation, and that the mean escape length near 1 TeV per amu is about 1 g cm-2.