Explorers will face dangerous amounts of radiation on their journey to Mars | Smart News

Traveling to Mars is the next big step in space travel for humanity. In Hollywood, the recent movie The Martian and television series The first Introduce yourself to the red planet as a short-term logistical challenge rather than a space dream. NASA is currently moving towards a Mission "Moon to Mars"but the technical hurdles facing a Mars mission are still huge. One of the most difficult challenges is managing the radiation dose that would be faced by interplanetary astronauts. Meghan Bartels at Space.com reports that new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) have refined our radiation pattern during the journey to and from Mars, and that does not look good.

Exomars from ESA Trace Gas Orbiter was launched in 2016 and put into orbit around March after a six-month trip in interplanetary space. During his trip, an instrument called the Liulin-MO dosimeter tracked radiation from the machine and monitored the radiation since the TGO reached its orbit. Using these data, the researchers determined that any interplanetary astronaut traveling the same route would be 60% of the maximum radiation dose throughout their career, not counting the time spent on the surface of the planet at work and explore.

"The radiation doses accumulated by astronauts in the interplanetary space would be several hundred times higher than the doses accumulated by humans over the same period on Earth and several times higher than the doses of astronauts and astronauts. cosmonauts working on the international space station, "said Jordanka Semkova. of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and lead scientist of Liulin-MO instrument A press release. "Our results show that the trip itself would offer a very important exposure to radiation for astronauts.

The data back up similar radiation levels detected when the Mars Science Laboratory made the same trip in 2011 and 2012.

Sheyna E. Gifford at Astrobiology Magazine points out that we do not think too much about radiation on the surface of the Earth, because the powerful magnetic field around our planet deviates most of the radiation. But in open spaces, things are different. Astronauts are bombarded by solar energy particles and galactic cosmic rays. A trip to Mars would be like passing twice by CT scan, which is almost 15 times greater than the radiation exposure allowed for workers at a nuclear power plant.

To protect future Mars-o-nauts, engineers must design a shield for galactic cosmic rays (GCR), but this is easier said than done. The particles are powerful.

"They tear you apart as if you were cellophane," said Sarah Scoles the biomedical and health informatist Dan Masys of the University of Washington. Nova. Until now, there is no practical method to protect ships or astronauts against particles.

Radiation not only increases cancer risk, Scoles reports, but NASA has also identified dozens of other health issues related to exposure, including disturbed sleep, cardiovascular and degenerative diseases, infertility, eye coordination . According to Masys, radiation is a "chord breaker" for any long-term project to explore the human space.

Once the explorers reach the surface of Mars, the radiation does not stop. Gifford reports that the Curiosity Rover data show that GCR exposure is about half as much as in space, but the protection against solar energy particles is uneven and unpredictable, which means that the ExoMars 2020 Mission, which will include a new Mars rover, will include a similar dosimeter that will provide us with even more accurate data on the radiation we can expect on the surface of the red planet.

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