![]() So far there’s no practical method to shield ships or astronauts from the particles. “They rip through you like you’re cellophane,” biomedical and health informaticist Dan Masys of the University of Washington tells Sarah Scoles at Nova. To protect future Mars-o-nauts, engineers need to design a shield for the galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), but that’s easier said than done. A trip to Mars would be like going through a CAT scan two dozen times, which is almost 15 times higher than the radiation exposure allowed for workers at a nuclear power plant. Astronauts are bombarded by solar energetic particles and galactic cosmic rays. But up in open space things are different. Gifford at Astrobiology Magazine reports that we don’t think too much about radiation here on the surface of the Earth because the powerful magnetic field surrounding our planet deflects most radiation. The data backs up similar radiation levels detected when the Mars Science Laboratory took the same trip back in 20. “Our results show that the journey itself would provide very significant exposure for the astronauts to radiation.” “Radiation doses accumulated by astronauts in interplanetary space would be several hundred times larger than the doses accumulated by humans over the same time period on Earth, and several times larger than the doses of astronauts and cosmonauts working on the International Space Station,” Jordanka Semkova of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and lead scientist of the Liulin-MO instrument says in a press release. ![]() Using that data, researchers determined that any interplanetary astronaut staking the same trip would experience 60 percent of their maximum career-long radiation dose just during that trip to and from Mars, not including any time spent on the surface of the planet working and exploring. During its trip an instrument called the Liulin-MO dosimeter kept track of the radiation the craft experienced and has kept tabs on radiation since the TGO reached orbit. The ESA’s Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter was launched in 2016 and made it into orbit around Mars after a six-month journey through interplanetary space. Meghan Bartels at reports that new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) has refined our model for radiation during the journey to and from Mars, and it doesn’t look good. One of the most difficult challenges is dealing with the dose of radiation any interplanetary astronauts would face. NASA is currently orienting itself toward a “Moon to Mars” Mission, but the technical hurdles facing a Mars mission are still massive. In Hollywood, the recent movie The Martian and television series The First present reaching the Red Planet as more of a near-term logistics challenge rather than a pie-in-the-sky space dream. Traveling to Mars is the next great step in humanity’s space journey.
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