The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 9, 2008

Official News page 9


REAL LIFE NEWS: FORCEFIELDS WILL SHIELD MARS ASTRONAUTS

by Hazed

There's a problem facing astronauts who head for Mars - or for anywhere else away from the Earth, for that matter. How do they survive the deadly radiation storms sent out by our sun? Once away from the Earth's magnetosphere, the risk from solar radiation is high. The Apollo astronauts who visited the Moon during the 1960s and 70s were reasonably safe because the missions only lasted a short while, but even so, had there been a major solar storm they could have been in trouble because there's no lunar atmosphere to protect explorers.

Exposure to solar radiation can cause radiation sickness, which even if it doesn't kill those caught in it outright, can bring on cancers later in life.

So anyone taking a trip to Mars is going to be in real danger. The length of the voyage - it's projected to take six months each way - means that a solar storm is almost certain to occur at some point while they are in transit.

Now scientists think they have cracked the problem, and their solution will bring joy to the heart of any science fiction fan. They are going to use a forcefield.

Boffins at the Rutherford Appleton Lab and Universities of York, Strathclyde and Lisbon have shown that it's possible to generate a portable manetosphere - that's a magentic forcefield to you and me - just a few hundred meters across, which would prevent ionized particles from reaching a spaceship. Previously, it had been thought that only enormous planetary-sized fields like the one around the Earth could possibly be effective, but new computer simulations suggest that just a small "hole" in the solar winds could be enough. Let's hope so!

Of course, if it really is possible to generate a portable forcefield, there are plenty of other applications it could be used for. When we build a permanent base on the moon, both the buildings and mono rovers would find such shielding very useful, because although the bulk of the planet would protect against storms some of the time, it won't always.

Not to mention that I want a personal forcefield to protect me against aliens with rayguns...


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