The NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) was constructed in collaboration with NASA for the purpose of performing radiation effect studies for the NASA space program. The results of commissioning of this new facility were reported in [l]. In this report we will describe the results of the first run. The NSRL is capable of making use of heavy ions in the range of 0.05 to 3 GeV/n slow extracted from BNL's AGS Booster. Many modes of operation were explored during the first run, demonstrating all the capabilities designed into the system. Heavy ion intensities from 100 particles per pulse up to 12 x 10{sup 9} particles per pulse were delivered to a large variety of experiments, providing a dose range up to 70 Gy/min over a 5 x 5 cm{sup 2} area. Results presented will include those related to the production of beams that are highly uniform in both the transverse and longitudinal planes of motion [2].

The NASA SPACE RADIATION LABORATORY (NSRL) has been constructed and started operations at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2003. The NSRL facility will be used by NASA to perform radiation effect studies on materials and biological samples for the space program. The facility utilizes proton and heavy-ion beams of energies from 50 to 3000 MeVln which are accelerated by the AGS Booster synchrotron accelerator. To date, {sup 1}H, {sup 12}C, {sup 56}Fe, {sup 48}Ti, and {sup 197}Au ion beams of various magnetic rigidities have been extracted from the Booster, and transported by the NSRL beam transport line to the sample location which is located 100 m from the extraction point. The NSRL beam transport line has been designed to employ octupole magnetic elements which transform the normal (Gaussian) beam distribution at the location of the sample into a beam with rectangular cross section, and uniformly distributed over the sample. When using the octupole magnetic elements to obtain the uniform beam distribution on the sample, no beam-collimation is applied at any location along the NSRL beam transport line and the beam focusing on the sample is purely magnetic. The main subject of this paper will be the performance of the octupoles …