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Star Trek Shields Now a Possibility?
An anonymous reader writes "British scientists have announced their intent to build a Star Trek-style magnetic shielding system to help protect astronauts from radiation. 'There are a variety of risks facing future space explorers, not least of which is the cancer-causing radiation encountered when missions venture beyond the protective magnetic envelope, or magnetosphere, which shields the Earth against these energetic particles. The Earth's magnetosphere deflects many of these particles; others are largely absorbed by the atmosphere.'"
This is damn peculiar...
(I really should have raised them)
Maybe with this kind of a shielding system we might be able to put a man on the moon for real.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They'll probably need to leave them turned on at all times, so no one will get to say "Shields Up!".
[Insert pithy quote here]
Course, it wouldn't be long before Jack-Ass had shields around someone's nether regions, and shot it with a gun.
Funny, this being slashdot, I'd have thought your first choice would be either a holodeck or seven of nine. :-P
(Though admittedly in either case the boobs in question aren't real, but hey.)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I hope we have cleared that up, dammit.
This was reported on slashdot three years ago. The space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot summary is actually much more detailed in terms of the science. The big engineering problems with this approach still have not been solved. (1) If you're not using superconducting magnet coils, a large, static magnetic field requires a huge power supply to keep it going. That's not practical for foreseeable, near-future technologies for going to Mars, which will need to use very small payloads. (2) Superconducting magnets are unreliable, finicky beasts, at least from my experience here on earth. You need big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. It's not necessarily a good idea to have a vital piece of safety equipment for your spaceship depend on an inherently high-maintenance, low-reliability technology. (3) Large electric fields are hard to maintain because you get arcing and discharges. I used to work at an electrostatic accelerator that used megavolt potentials, and it would start sparking at the most inopportune times, for reasons like, e.g., someone leaving behind a speck of lint inside the accelerator. When a spark would happen, you could hear it all through the building, and the energy released was equivalent to dropping a VW bug off the roof of a building. Again, low-reliability, high maintenance. (4) Although it's possible to use tricks to get rid of some of the particles, or channel particles to a place where they're not as harmful, you still have to deal with the fact that you have particles with both signs of charge, which feel forces in opposite directions from the same field. What repels one attracts the other. Also, if the particles get channeled to a certain place, and impact on something solid, then you get extremely intense secondary radiation at that spot.
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Can they be made really small?
Won't anyone think of the bees?
Captain Kirk: Raise Shields!
;)
Mr. Spock: Captain, may I remind you that these new shields developed by British scientists rely on Magnetic fields and as a result...
Captain Kirk: Not now Spock!
Chekov: Shields up, Captain!
Lights flicker, ship powers down. Emergency lights light up**
Captain Kirk: Spock! What happened?
Mr. Spock: It appears that the magnetic shields have erased our hard-drives. Our ship is powerless.
Captain Kirk: KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!
Disclaimer: I have no idea if magnetic shields would really erase hard-drives, but oh well!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
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So does that mean when went sent people to space before, they got exposed to all kinds of particals and stuff? Are they still ok? If so, then do we really need this? Or....did we fake the moon stuff?
Galactic cosmic rays are the biggest, most difficult problem. For a variety of reasons, explained in the WP link, they're not a big problem for low-earth orbit space stations like the ISS. The Apollo astronauts did get exposed to a lot of radiation, but they were only out for about a week, whereas an elliptical transfer orbit to Mars takes 1.4 years round trip in interplanetary space. For anyone who's actually had to wear a radiation badge to work, the integrated dosages they've estimated for a Mars issue just sound nuts, like somebody moved a decimal place over three places by mistake. It's a huge amount of radiation, roughly on the right order of magnitude to kill a human being. The Apollo astronauts got dosages at the level where there's speculation they may be getting cataracts at a significantly higher rate than normal. Scale that up by a ratio of 1.4 years to 1 week, and you get effects that are just not on the order of magnitude that you could laugh off heroically.
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No, no, no, dude.
You only need bio-gel packs and iso-linear chips. But, only the green ones.
If you use the red ones and get them mixed up, you'll need Data to save your ass.
As long as they can redirect primary power from the sheild to the deflector dish, I will be happy. They will have a deflector dish right? ... Right?
there is a lab in the southwest (nevada i think) where they generate fields as strong as the earth's magnetic field (in otherwords, what theyre looking for here).
The Earth's magnetic field is wimpy. A refrigerator magnet produces a stronger field. The thing about Earth's field is that it is HUGE, spatially. So particles have a LOT of field to contend with on their way through the magnetosphere. Even though the field itself is incredibly weak.Scotty, mod him up.
My how slashdot has fallen. If these are "star trek shields" I'm an Aardvaark. How the fuck did this one get past the editors? Were they asleep at the time?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yeah. Since photons have no charge, a *magnetic* shield doesn't nothing against radiation. This article is about a magnetic shield to deflect charged particles like cosmic rays and solar wind.
It won't stop electromagnetic radiation, but that's not the only kind of radiation. Alpha and beta particles both count as radiation, and they can both be deflected magnetically.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
i don't know what is more worrying, your knowledge of star trek
or the fact you know the exact episode this happened