Measuring Light Isotope Cosmic Rays with HELIX

Galactic cosmic ray nuclei have been measured at high energies, impacting our understanding of cosmic ray propagation and acceleration. Making a measurement of light isotope abundances will further our understanding of cosmic ray propagation. The High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX) is a balloon-borne magnetic spectrometer with high mass resolution for light isotopes, such as Beryllium-9 and Beryllium-10. HELIX is designed with: a high precision gas drift chamber tracker in a 1 Tesla magnetic field to measure the rigidity, time-of-flight scintillator paddles to measure charge and low energy velocities, and an aerogel based ring imaging Cherenkov detector to measure high energy velocities. In its first flight, HELIX expects to measure hundreds of beryllium events from 0.2 GeV/n to 3 GeV/n along with other light isotopes. In this talk, I will present the science goals, an overview of the payload, and an update on its first planned flight.