Radiation shield.

"Kaido Kert" wrote in message
om...
"Christian Ramos" wrote in message
...
There appears little room for payload now, so placing biologicals and
associated life support on those payloads seems a bit ridiculous,
I asked the same question in another online discussion, and got the
number of around 50kg for one rat and its consumables for a six-month
cruise, including associated equipment. I suspect its closer to 100
but still not prohibitely high.

Hmm. I think that would be significant unless it was on its own mission.

let alone the fact that you would have to go to mars to actually
retreive the rats..
Additionally, rats arent really going to cut it in determining the
effect on
humans, plants and other species.
Its not absolutely necessary to retrieve them, is it ? We could simply
pack sufficient health monitoring equipment along. Of course,
returning it back to earth and monitoring the long-term effects would
be even better, so if you have a mars sample return mission, it would
be perhaps possible to return biological experiments from martian
orbit along with surface sample.

I'm not aware of such equipment, you would probably have more luck utilising
cell cultures and such, but again the data would only marginally be
relevant. We're not talking about radiation as comes out of reactor core, it
is a different thing.

Obivously effects on humans would be far from certain with rat
experiment, but we could be a lot more confident, after all we have
used rats for such purposes for centuries. But packing a couple plants
along would be a good idea of course, especially because those wouldnt
cost much in a payload.

We're probably, getting into the realms of where experts in the area need to
comment, however, the documents I've read indicate this wouldnt be viable.
It's more than monitoring their health, you want to see what damage is down
for both different fluxes of radiation and accumulated forms of radiation.
How would you match them. You could probably measure the radiation, a
sophisticated thing when talking space operation, but how would you measure
the impact on cells for each form, how would you determine the secondary
effects and interations between various forms of damage and other biological
processes, how would you differenatiate changes from radiation as opposed to
gravity or environmental.

Eventually some living organism is going to have to take the trip, and
it would be kinda stupid to have the first human crew as test
subjects.
Why..I dont remember Nasa sending rats to the moon before the Apollo
landing.
But they put chimps in Mercury capsules, didnt they. US was in a race
then and didnt have enough time to do it. Were there never plans to
put animals on Surveyors ?

Sure..But the Mercury capsules were LEO that is not that environment of
outer space that the apollos encountered on the way to the moon. As for the
data that was gathered, well I would guess it gave them a systems
integration perspective, ie: does everything seem to work. Space was very
much an unknown which probably drove the chimps and dogs in space, although,
it's an interesting question, why did the chimp go into to space, was it
just a conservative approach to validation or something else.

I'm sure in one of the historical books I've read that the chimp decision
was made by Von braun given his lack of confidence in the boosters, but I
could be totally screwed up there, will have to dig them up once my "lab" is
complete