Preliminary CALET Ultra Heavy Cosmic Ray Abundance Measurements

The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) on the International Space Station (ISS) was launched August 19, 2015 and has been returning excellent data for over a year. The main calorimeter (CAL) on CALET measures the fluxes of high-energy electrons, nuclei and gamma rays. In addition to measuring the energy spectra of the more abundant cosmic-ray nuclei through $_{26}$Fe, CAL has the dynamic range to measure the abundances of the ultra-heavy (UH) cosmic-ray nuclei through $_{40}$Zr. In an anticipated 5 year mission on the ISS CALET will collect a UH data set with statistics comparable to that achieved with the first flight of the SuperTIGER balloon-borne instrument. The CALET space-based measurement has the advantage of not requiring corrections for atmospheric losses, and unlike other UH measurements the abundances of all nuclei from $_{1}$H through $_{40}$Zr are observed with the same instrument. We present preliminary CALET UH analysis results from the first year of operation.