New York Times: Mars Mission's Invisible Enemy: Radiation

Today's New York Times (free registration required) has an article that
is quite relevant to the manned spaceflight thread:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/09/science/space/09RADI.html.

"In a new $34 million NASA laboratory here, part of Brookhaven National
Laboratory, scientists are using subatomic particles accelerated to
nearly the speed of light to slam into materials that could be used in
a spaceship, and tissue samples and small animals. Using tools like PET
and M.R.I. scans and DNA sequencing, they hope to shed light on ways
that radiation damages biological tissue, and what can be done about
it..."

"...A round trip to Mars would be of a different order of magnitude.
Brookhaven puts the exposure at 130,000 millirem over two and a half
years. That is equivalent to almost 400 years of natural exposure..."

Davoud

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt com

Actually, I'd rather see more investigation into Venus. NASA has an
interesting paper on its site about creating floating "cities" about 22
miles off the surface, where temperature, pressure, and gravity are
essentially Earth-like. Just bring your O2 and party. Venus is also a
potential fund of scientific data concerning climates, atmospheres, runaway
greenhouse effects, etc. It's closer, and is a better launch point for
asteroid investigation, according to this paper.

http://powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/p...ony_STAIF03.pd
f

Mars, on the other hand, has problems with radiation, airlessness, pressure,
and very low temps, to say nothing of not enough gravity for long-term
settlement. Yes, we can send people there to walk around, but for what
purpose? To say we did? There are other, better space challenges that I
think would fulfill our need to explore than a trip to Mars.

Eric Martin

Eric Martin wrote:


Mars, on the other hand, has problems with radiation, airlessness, pressure,
and very low temps, to say nothing of not enough gravity for long-term
settlement. Yes, we can send people there to walk around, but for what
purpose? To say we did?


They could wear weight belts fashioned from martian iron. Or we could
send them to recover from knee/hip replacement surgery?

Happy Holidays,
Etok



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