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Astronauts Could Survive Mars Radiation for Long Stretches, Rover Study Suggests
http://www.space.com/18753-mars-radiation-manned-mission.html
Astronauts Could Survive Mars Radiation for Long Stretches, Rover Study Suggests
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer | December 04, 2012 10:51am ET
SAN FRANCISCO — Astronauts could endure a long-term, roundtrip Mars mission without receiving a worryingly high radiation dose, new results from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity suggest.
A mission consisting of a 180-day outbound cruise, a 600-day stay on Mars and another 180-day flight back to Earth would expose an astronaut to a total radiation dose of about 1.1 sieverts (units of radiation) if it launched now, according to measurements by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector instrument, or RAD.
That's a pretty manageable number, researchers said.
"The rough ballpark average for an astronaut career limit is on the order of a sievert," RAD principal investigator Don Hassler, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a presentation here Monday (Dec. 3) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Video: Curiosity Takes First Cosmic Ray Sample on Surface]
"NASA has a much more complicated determination for that, but ESA [the European Space Agency], for example, generally uses 1 sievert for that number," he added.
<snip>
Astronauts Could Survive Mars Radiation for Long Stretches, Rover Study Suggests
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer | December 04, 2012 10:51am ET
SAN FRANCISCO — Astronauts could endure a long-term, roundtrip Mars mission without receiving a worryingly high radiation dose, new results from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity suggest.
A mission consisting of a 180-day outbound cruise, a 600-day stay on Mars and another 180-day flight back to Earth would expose an astronaut to a total radiation dose of about 1.1 sieverts (units of radiation) if it launched now, according to measurements by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector instrument, or RAD.
That's a pretty manageable number, researchers said.
"The rough ballpark average for an astronaut career limit is on the order of a sievert," RAD principal investigator Don Hassler, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a presentation here Monday (Dec. 3) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Video: Curiosity Takes First Cosmic Ray Sample on Surface]
"NASA has a much more complicated determination for that, but ESA [the European Space Agency], for example, generally uses 1 sievert for that number," he added.
<snip>
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
According to Star trek... 