The AMS-02 TRD for the international space station

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is an experiment which will be mounted on the international space station (ISS) to measure primary cosmic ray spectra in space. A key element is the transition radiation detector (TRD) to extract an e/sup +/ or p/sup -/ signal reducing the p/sup +/ or e/sup -/ background by a rejection factor 10/sup 2/--10/sup 3/ in an energy range from 10 to 300 GeV. This will be used in combination with an electromagnetic calorimeter to provide overall p/sup +/ rejection of 10/sup 6/ at 90% e/sup +/ efficiency. The detector consists of 20 layers of 6 mm diameter straw tubes alternating with 20 mm layers of polyethylene/polypropylene fleece radiator. The tubes are filled with a 4:1 mixture of Xe:CO/sub 2/ at 1 bar absolute pressure from a recirculating gas system designed to operate >3 years in space. There are in total 5248 straw tubes which are read out by a custom-made DAQ system in less than 80 /spl mu/s. The electronics must be low in power consumption and sustain the stringent requirements of operation in space. The construction of the detector and its electronics is presented in this paper.