[ExI] Radiation damage could stop manned trips to Mars
Stephen Van Sickle
sjv2006 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 11 20:45:40 UTC 2016
On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 12:40 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 October 2016 at 19:57, Stephen Van Sickle wrote:
>
> This lab is part of NASA’s Human
> Research Program
>
So what? NASA is as capable of bad science as anyone.
> The rate of
> dosage doesn't matter.
Yes, it does. It matters quite a bit. If you live in Denver for 80 years,
your total background dose is abut 1 Sv. Any effect of that won't be
measurable. If you get that dose in one hour, you will show symptoms of
Acute Radiation Syndrome and have about a 5% chance of dying from it in a
month. Rate likely will have a different effect with cosmic radiation than
with gamma, but a blanket statement that "rate of dosage doesn't matter" is
just plain wrong.
I also said "take with a big grain of salt", not "disregard entirely".
Heavy ion radiation is one of the two biggest medical concerns (the other
being .38 g gravity effects). It is a serious issue, but like .38 g just
about impossible to experiment with on earth. Even if there is an
accelerator that can create cosmic ray energies (and there isn't), no one
would tie it up for 2 or 3 years for one experiment. So they do the
experiment that they can, not the one which they need. Very common, but
the results are rarely definitive.
s
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