The CALET CHD for determination of nuclear charge

Calorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) will be a high energy cosmic ray observatory on the Japanese Experimental Module - Exposed Facility of the International Space Station. In addition to electrons and gamma-rays, CALET has an excellent detection capability of cosmic ray nuclei. In order to determine the atomic number of measured nuclei, the CHarge Detector (CHD) is placed on the top of the calorimeter. The CALET-CHD consists of two orthogonal layers of plastic scintillator charge-measuring modules. Each layer is segmented into 14 scintillator paddles (45 cm×3.2 cm×1 cm) for the reduction of back scattering effects. We evaluated the charge resolution of the plastic scintillators with heavy ion accelerators. In this presentation, we will report the design of the CALET-CHD and its nuclei identification capability as inferred from heavy ion beam tests.