On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 23:53:38 -0500, Odysseus wrote:


Certainly not -- unless you're one of those who believes the moon missions
were a hoax because the Apollo craft would have been 'fried' on leaving
the earth's atmosphere & magnetosphere.

Pretty obvious if I'd thought about it from point of view. I won't mention
what was shown of the city a bit later then. :-)

I can't see any damage being caused by a short-term local disappearance of
the magnetic field beyond, perhaps, an elevated rate of cancers and birth
defects in the affected population, depending on the duration of the
exposure. I don't have figures to hand, but from qualitative descriptions

I was thinking structural damage at the microscopic/elemental level but,
that too got put to sleep in your first paragraph.

of the radiation risks in interplanetary space travel I would guess that
an exposure of only 10-15 seconds, absent a simultaneous solar flare or
CME, would be orders of magnitude weaker than an ordinary medical chest
X-ray. Note also that the atmosphere absorbs quite a bit of cosmic
radiation, beside the portion that's diverted by the earth's magnetic
field.

Dramatisation, don't ya' love it?! :-)