Mars-Bound Probe Serves As Radiation Guinea Pig

sighted writes "This week's huge solar storm will benefit future astronauts, thanks to the rover Curiosity, now on its way to Mars. The rover is equipped with an instrument that measures the radiation exposure that could affect a human astronaut en route to the Red Planet. Scientists are just starting to pore over the data from the blast of particles. Don't worry about the poor robotic geologist, though: 'No harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event,' says NASA."

Comments

Damn no one tell

[Dyinobal]

I hope no on tells PETA that NASA is irradiating a guinea pig with a probe.

D.O.A.

[ebonum]

This problem could make a manned trip to Mars impossible. The radiation in open space from one solar flare would fry a bunch of astronauts. Sending people to Mars becomes a gamble on the odds of a solar event occurring. Worse yet. There is no technology within reach that can protect astronauts from this type of radiation. A few feet of lead shielding might help some, but the weight would be too much to get into space. Plus, try slowing down all that mass when you arrive at Mars. Perhaps a nuclear powered wire loop ( super conducting??? ) with a circumference of a mile or two? Something with enough kick to deflect super high speed charged particles a few meters - enough to keep them away from the crew?...
I don't see any way to get people to mars with an acceptably high probability of survival.

Re:D.O.A.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Agreed. Someday, people will simply wake up to the fact that we evolved to be here, and anything outside of our thin biospheric shell is simply not "a really good idea". There's nothing wrong with being trapped on earth *if you take care of the place*.

We're not going to Mars. Period. Get over it. At the rate we're going we'll be lucky to feed ourselves by 2025...

Re:D.O.A.

[celticryan]

You are not quite right. For this sort of radiation, lead is not so great. You want shielding that contains lots of low-Z nuclei. The more hydrogen the better. This is because you get a lot of secondary nuclear fragments and hydrogen minimizes these sort of interactions. For Mars, it actually isn't the solar storms that are worrying - it is the fairly constant galactic cosmic ray background that is more difficult to shield against. It is has a high energy tail that is quit penetrating.

Solar storms are important, but a small storm shelter inside the craft can, in principal, handle this. Storms are typically short, so confining the crew to this area is typically reasonable.

Re:D.O.A.

[celticryan]

These have/are being looked into. See this review by Townsend from a few years ago: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1559364

Nothing has really changed in the state of the art of active shielding. They all fail miserably at even the theory stage or practical engineering stage.

Re:D.O.A.

[JoshuaZ]

The radiation in open space from one solar flare would fry a bunch of astronauts.

Unless the solar flare actually directly hits the spacecraft this isn't a big worry. In fact, to some extent under the right circumstances things are safe during a solar flare since there will be less exposure to cosmic rays due to the Forbush effect- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbush_decrease. And magnetic shielding can easily handle any indirect solar flare, while direct hits are extremely rare (the ISS for example has been in space for about a decade and has never gotten a serious direct hit). In general, the risk of solar flares is wildly overestimated.

My nomination

[PopeRatzo]

Newt was not the first to propose an ambitious space project.

Mars, bitches!

And this, my fellow Americans, is why we need to have our first real black president.

On the surface

[imemyself]

It would be interesting as well to know how much of an impact this would have to people on the Martian surface. Mars's magnetic field is pretty weak compared to ours. I guess they would be a little better protected just by the planet surface itself.

Even on the Apollo missions to the moon, they recognized that a solar storm could be a significant threat to the astronauts. Given the infrequence they decided to just take their chances. But the time they spent outside of the LEO was pretty low compared to what a Mars mission would entail.

Re:On the surface

[cavreader]

You are correct. We are protected on Earth by the planets magnetic fields and atmosphere. The amount of radiation every bio-organism on the planet is subjected too has played an important role in evolution on the planet. Too much radiation or smaller amounts of radiation could have nudged evolution to the extent where humans may never have evolved in it's current form. One thing that I have wandered about is why people think that human evolution has stopped. If there are humans still alive in a couple of million years would the species have the same physical traits that exist today? The environmental conditions the human species originally evolved from is constantly being changed by both natural and man made activity. On the moon we could lessen our exposure to radiation by building underground but for Mars we would need a way to protect people during the voyage before we could start building underground habitats on that planet. I believe someone will eventually make a break through in understanding how to nullify and manipulate radiation levels when necessary. So far we have just tapped the most obvious uses of the electromagnetic spectrum we use in our communication devices and computers but there is still a great deal we do not understand. Even our knowledge of nuclear processes is weak when it comes to practical applications. We can produce fission for bombs and power plants but we cannot harness fusion based processes in the real world. Does anyone else think that the guys who built and deployed the first nuclear bomb were 100% confident that the nuclear reaction would not start a chain reaction in the atmosphere? Doing the math is one thing but actually detonating a nuclear weapon was something altogether different and risky.

Re:On the surface

[AK Marc]

We've evolved tools to protect those incapable of protecting themselves, and we strive for the norm. We are going to fight evolution, not embrace it. Evolution is thousands of tiny mutations, accumulating an advantage. But any further mutations will be stopped..

Does anyone else think that the guys who built and deployed the first nuclear bomb were 100% confident that the nuclear reaction would not start a chain reaction in the atmosphere?

They weren't 100% sure. And the people making the first trains worried that traveling 35 mph or faster would prevent you from breathing. New things always trigger "OMG, what if" and nearly none of them have ever come true.

Sky Crane

[lazarus]

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching the Curiosity Launch Video. I don't think the rover has to worry about radiation so much as the landing. I'd like to start a pool on which part of the untested landing sequence will fail and deliver a smoking hole in Mars instead of the rover.

I seriously hope it works - if it does it will be one of humanity's most amazing technological feats. But I fear the worst.

Re:Sky Crane

[MightyYar]

So when it wound up with a parachute I thought, "Ahh, Lazarus was exaggerating, this ain't so bad."

Then it deployed a rocket lander and I thought, "Oh, maybe he's right."

Then it popped the rover out on a Mars yo-yo, and I said, "Oh, come on!"

Then it gently releases the rover and goes shooting off over the horizon and I just started chuckling.

If this thing works, NASA rules.

Re:Sky Crane

[FrootLoops]

Quick, call NASA! Screw the rocket scientists and engineers who designed the thing and whose work almost certainly includes detailed failure rate estimates which ended up being acceptably low for the project to proceed. We may as well press the self-destruct button now and get it over with.

This is the part of /. I hate the most--nerds blessing the world with their special insight, because they really do have insight in their chosen field, and that translates to every other field, right?

Any long term trip in space

[koan]

Needs a lot of water, if you were to locate the water in between hull layers it acts as quite a nice radiation shield.

And perhaps, though I'm not certain and currently feeling lazy, a micro meteorite shield as well.

Re: Food Lockers

[DanielRavenNest]

When we studied manned Mars missions at Boeing, and ate samples of the long term food, we placed the "storm shelter" in the middle of the food storage lockers. Food contains water and carbohydrates which contain hydrogen, which is good shielding. If you have a once-through food system, the waste goes back in the same lockers, and maintains the shielding. If you have a regenerative life support, with a greenhouse, the storm shelter goes in the middle of the growing area/water tanks/food storage. Even with a greenhouse there will be some stored food.

For sustainable development, you want to hijack materials from an asteroid between Earth and Mars, and install a habitat surrounded by rock shielding. Placed in a transfer orbit between the two planets, you ride it most of the way, only exposing the crew at the ends of the trip. The habitat spends most of it's time growing food and extracting materials and fuel, which get forwarded to other locations by electric tugs. A sustainable supply chain is necessary if you ever want much more than a "flags and footprints" mission.