Space exploration and radiation

Interesting article in yesterday's NY Times science section; space travel isn't just physics, it's also physiology:

As the United States considers new goals for NASA after the loss of the Columbia, some space enthusiasts have renewed calls for a mission to Mars.

But a team of physicists and biologists here at a laboratory on Long Island is demonstrating that even if the nation wanted to commit to such a goal, it would be far more complex than the Moon mission that gripped the country in the 60's.

One reason is radiation, in the form of heavy ions from distant stars, zipping through everything in their path. . .

In a new $34 million NASA laboratory here, part of Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are using subatomic particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light to slam into materials that could be used in a spaceship, and tissue samples and small animals. Using tools like PET and M.R.I. scans and DNA sequencing, they hope to shed light on ways that radiation damages biological tissue, and what can be done about it.

On a trip to Mars and back, probably every cell in the body would be hit by an ionized particle or a proton, researchers say, and they have very little idea what that would do. "If every neuron in your brain gets hit, do you come back being a blithering idiot, or not?" asked Dr. Derek I. Lowenstein, the chairman of Brookhaven's collider accelerator department.

Read the whole thing -- the comparison of estimated dosages puts exposure on a roundtrip to Mars at 130,000 millirem (about 400 years' worth of natural exposure) over two and a half years, and exposure not to the gamma rays found here on Earth, but to heavy, fast-moving ions.

Posted by David on December 10, 2003 10:19 PM