Auger Report for Mérida 2007

The Pierre Auger Observatory is located in the province of Mendoza in western Argentina (35.5^o S, 69.3^o W). Construction will be complete at the end of 2007, but production data have been collected by the growing observatory since January 2004. At the time of writing,over 1200 of the 1600 water Cherenkov particle detector tanks have been deployed on a 1.5 km triangular grid [1] (Figure 1). Each surface detector (SD) tank contains 12 tonnes of water (10 m² area), and each is equipped with local digitizing electronics (400 MHz sampling rate), solar power, GPS receiver and a radio communication system[2]. The final fluorescence detector (FD) site came into operation in February 2007 on the northern edge of the SD array. Now four sites view the atmosphere above the array, with each site consisting of 6 Schmidt telescopes, a design chosen for improved optical performance. The telescopes each have a field of view of approximately 30^o × 30^o ,mirror area of 12 m², aperture area of 3.8 m² and 440 hexagonal pixels of 1.5^o diameter. Pixel signals are digitized with 100 MHz sampling [2].