A New Transition Radiation Detector for the CREAM experiment

The Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment is designed to investigate the source, propagation and acceleration mechanism of high energy cosmic-ray nuclei, by directly measuring their energy and charge. Incorporating a Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) provides a model independent energy measurement complementary to the calorimeter, as well as additional track reconstruction capability. A new TRD design provides a compact, robust, reliable, low density detector to measure incident nucleus energy for 3 < Z < 26 nuclei in the Lorentz gamma factor range of 10 2 -10 5. The TRD design, R&D;, construction milestones, beam test results and a progress of the final TRD integration in the CREAM instrument are reported.