The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has granted Critical Decision (CD) 3 approval to the MINERvA experiment.

Full text of the approval document is available here in PDF format.

CD-3 approval means that the design and engineering are essentially complete, a final design review has been performed, and the experiment is ready to begin construction, procurement, and fabrication. CD-3 for the case of MINERvA was granted in two parts: CD-3a (approval for a limited number of construction items) was granted in March 2007 and the full CD-3 ("CD-3b") on 8 November 2007.

CD-3 authorizes the experiment to commit all the resources necessary, within the funds provided, to execute the project (from DOE Order 413.3a). The Department of Energy Office of Science has requested funding from Congress for construction of MINERvA in its FY08 budget request.

The total cost of the construction project for the MINERvA experiment is estimated to be 16.8M$.

MINERvA is a neutrino scattering experiment which uses the NuMI beamline at Fermilab. MINERvA seeks to measure low energy neutrino interactions both in support of neutrino oscillation experiments and also to study the strong dynamics of the nucleon and nucleus that affect these interactions. MINERvA is currently in its final design and prototyping stages. The first detector module was completed in early 2007 and we plan to begin taking data in 2009.