NASA to start radiating monkeys (MSNBC)

By Irene Klotz

updated 44 minutes ago
NASA is stepping up its space radiation studies with a round of experiments that for the first time in decades will use monkeys as subjects.

The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield.

For the new study, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a low dose of the type of radiation that astronauts traveling to Mars can expect to encounter.

Scientists are particularly interested in studying how the radiation impacts the monkeys' central nervous systems and behaviors over time.

"We realized there was a need for this kind of work," Jack Bergman, a behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Boston, told Discovery News.
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more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33539909/ns/technology_and_science-science/

I realize the need for some animal experimentation, still, a little disturbing. Why don't they just shield the spacecraft better? :think:

There has been some work on using magnetic fields to enhance shielding; would need to look in Science forum.

of the challenges involved. ;)

such as lead, bismuth, or even depleted uranium -- greatly increases the mass of the spacecraft. If you added all that lead to the upper stage, you would need to increase the size of the engine (adding even more mass) and more fuel (ditto). So, now you have to make the previous stage bigger ... and it continues ad nauseum. The net result is that adding a few pounds to the uppermost stage can increase the size of the booster by a ton, and the biggest available booster sets the limit to what you can put in space.

That's why high strength-to-weigh-ratio materials like carbon fiber composites are worth their weight in gold, sometimes literally.

Almost every serious design proposal for an extended-duration manned spacecraft places the living space within the storage tanks (water and/or fuel) and is generally configured so that the people are deep inside all the hardware, so that every part of the spacecraft adds to the shielding. There's usually also a "deep shelter" compartment where people can jam in like sardines temporarily to escape solar flares etc.

... i.e., getting a representative dose to a shorter-lived creature at
the corresponding age but without the problems from too high a level ...?
:shrug:

of the title, I pictured NASA HQs with monkeys radiating out in all directions.

That's actually one of my pet peeves - people using "radiate" rather than "irradiate" - and the original article does say "irradiate"

...that monkeys are going to start flying out of NASA's butt?


:-)





Isn't the proper term "irradiating"?

Why must we always treat animals like this? There are always other ways. Rather then dose them up with rads how about just researching how to prevent the radiation from getting into the ship or space suits?

Radiation Protection 101: You might control 3 things - distance, time and shielding.

Distance is fixed by where Earth and Mars are - can't do much there.

Time - well, we get there as fast as we can. But it's still going to be months. Propulsion breakthrough technologies are always welcome!

Shielding - Main problem is that moving mass is expensive, which makes shielding expensive. Even innovative ideas like deflecting charged particles with magnetic fields will have "overhead" costs in terms of what you need to add to the spacecraft. And if you start devoting a lot of mass to shielding you start compromising the achievable delta-v for a given propulsion system, which in turn increases transit time, which increases radiation exposure time.

Still, I'm not sure what compelling radiation exposure risk question this research would effectively address.