CLIPSY MOON SHEILDS SKIN

“Highly energetic protons can easily penetrate the walls of a spacecraft, and are able to disrupt human DNA and molecular structures inside cells. “Being in a solar storm is like standing in the beam of a particle accelerator,” says Bamford. For astronauts caught in these streams, it could mean instant death. If the Sun has a sudden solar flare, or a “coronal mass ejection”, space fills with streams of high-energy protons. On a several months-long mission to the Red Planet, for instance, the unpredictability of “space weather” poses a problem. Once you leave the magnetosphere, though, you’ll be in trouble, says Dr Ruth Bamford from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) Space in Oxfordshire, UK. This material is rich in hydrogen, and hydrogen atoms are great at absorbing and dispersing radiation. To protect them, crew quarters are lined with high-density polyethylene, several centimetres thick. Orbiting 350 kilometres (220 miles) above Earth’s surface the International Space Station (ISS) is still within the magnetosphere, but the planet’s magnetic cocoon is already threadbare, and astronauts are exposed to radiation that amounts to the equivalent of about eight chest X-rays a day. On average, humans are hit by around 360 millirems of environmental radiation per year – the equivalent of five chest X-rays.

CLIPSY MOON SHEILDS SKIN

Here, below the protective magnetosphere, we are only exposed to UV radiation, which helps us tan, but also can cause skin cancer.

The renewed interest in human space exploration – with an application process already underway to select two astronauts for an ambitious Mars mission – demands efforts to ensure the safety of astronauts venturing far from Earth’s natural deflector shield, its magnetic field.

On Earth, scientists are busy trying to recreate this fictional concept, not to protect astronauts from aliens, but from a much more immediate and dangerous threat – streams of charged particles shooting out from our very own Sun.ĭealing with harmful radiation is becoming an ever-more relevant consideration. As any starship captain knows, should Klingons or Romulans ever attack your craft, the first thing you do is to raise the deflector shields.

Clipsy moon sheilds