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Will it be safe for humans to fly to Mars?
Sending human travelers to Mars would require scientists and engineers to overcome a range of technological and safety obstacles. One of them is the grave risk posed by particle radiation from the sun, distant stars and galaxies.
Answering two key questions would go a long way toward overcoming that hurdle: Would particle radiation pose too grave a threat to human life throughout a round trip to the red planet? And, could the very timing of a mission to Mars help shield astronauts and the spacecraft from the radiation?
In a new article published in the peer-reviewed journal Space Weather, an international team of space scientists, including researchers from UCLA, answers those two questions with a "no" and a "yes."
That is, humans should be able to safely travel to and from Mars, provided that the spacecraft has sufficient shielding and the round trip is shorter than approximately four years. And the timing of a human mission to Mars would indeed make a difference: The scientists determined that the best time for a flight to leave Earth would be when solar activity is at its peak, known as the solar maximum.
The scientists' calculations demonstrate that it would be possible to shield a Mars-bound spacecraft from energetic particles from the sun because, during solar maximum, the most dangerous and energetic particles from distant galaxies are deflected by the enhanced solar activity.
Journal Reference:
M. I. Dobynde, Y. Y. Shprits, A. Y. Drozdov, et al. Beating 1 Sievert: Optimal Radiation Shielding of Astronauts on a Mission to Mars [open], Space Weather (DOI: 10.1029/2021SW002749)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:03PM (5 children)
What kind of steel, specifically, is Starship made of?
https://www.rocheindustry.com/is-stainless-steel-magnetic/ [rocheindustry.com]
Next question would be, Do you really want a magnetized hull for space travel? You point out an obvious benefit, but what about all the instruments in and on the hull? Which will be affected, and how? If you can make all the instrumentation happy with magnetic surroundings, then what about the equipment? Imagine a valve picking up it's own magnetic charge from the hull, and refusing to turn, or drifting back to it's preferred orientation during a rocket engine burn.
I suspect that magnetizing the hull would introduce a lot of complications, that may or may not be solved.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:09PM (1 child)
Well, the biggest one I can think of is it will really mess up their credit cards and hotel room keys.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 15 2021, @03:23PM
Well if I can't stay at Olympus Mons Hilton, I'm not going!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 15 2021, @05:03PM (1 child)
Will instruments located in or on the hull go out of tune due to a magnetic field?
A Pitot tube [wikipedia.org] for example, used to measure air speed during the voyage to Mars, would seem to be unaffected by magnetism.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @07:37PM
The momenta of all of these particles under consideration are much too high for you to generate your own local magnetic field to shield them. Every now and then someone will win one of those NASA advanced concepts awards (those "pie-in-the-sky" ideas where they give you enough money to do a nice little study and write a paper) that have ideas along these lines of magnetic shielding, such as instead of generating a really strong local dipole field, you have a formation of unmanned spacecraft that can generate reasonable strength magnetic fields, but you fly them at a distance from the astronaut spacecraft to create a large effective field at a distance, etc., etc.).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15 2021, @07:52PM
I know right? I mean, how do they expect the compass to work? What if they end up going in circles???