A report from NBC News: Astronauts making a years-long voyage to Mars may get bombarded with enough cosmic radiation to seriously damage their brains, researchers reported Monday.
The damage might be bad enough to affect memory and, worse, might heighten anxiety, the team at the University of California Irvine said.
It's the second study the team has done to show that cosmic radiation causes permanent, and likely untreatable, brain damage.
While their experiments involve mice, the brain structures that are damaged are similar, they write in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
NASA knows that astronauts risk physical damage from the radiation encountered in space.
Earth is enveloped in a large, protective sheath called the magnetosphere, which deflects a lot of the ionizing radioactive particles that speed through space.
Teams aboard the International Space Station are inside that envelope.
But moon travelers were not, and this summer a study showed the cosmic radiation may have damaged the hearts of many of the Apollo program astronauts.
A trip to Mars would expose astronauts to even more radiation -- enough to cause cancer, for sure, and now this research suggests brain damage, as well.
They bombarded mice with the same type of radiation that would be encountered in space, and then looked at what happened to their brains.
It did not look good. The changes were seen in the connections between brain cells and in the cells, as well.
"Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel -- such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making.
Many of these adverse consequences to cognition may continue and progress throughout life."
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Van Allen Radiation Belt Reinforced by a third belt, still think man passed through these three belts protected only by thin aluminium and fabric? Lead is the only protection and space craft have no lead...
Scientists have been aware of the Van Allen radiation belts since the 1950s, but it was thought that there were only two of them.
The probes were sent up to simply map the belts in fine detail; the discovery of a third belt was a complete surprise.
Deputy mission scientist Shri Kanekal said, "By the fifth day REPT was on, we could plot out our observations and watch the formation of a third radiation belt.
We started wondering if there was something wrong with our instruments.
We checked everything, but there was nothing wrong with them.
The third belt persisted beautifully, day after day, week after week, for four weeks."
Part of the reason they caught a glimpse of this belt was that they turned the REPT on early, so it would overlap with another probe that had reached end-of-life and was about to de-orbit.
If they hadn't decided to do so, or if the REPT hadn't worked perfectly, we still might be in the dark about a third Van Allen belt.
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I predict that neither they nor anyone else will ever leave near earth orbit...
We can only send machines safely outside of the earth's protection from the Van Allen Radiation Belt. Here Is One Angle Point and here is another supporting this statement, and another.
Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld Admission?
Award winning filmmaker Bart Sibrel presents his highly acclaimed (and much hated) controversial documentary showcasing newly discovered behind-the-scenes out-takes from the first mission
to the moon, proving that the crew never left earth orbit.
Never before in all of recorded aviation has a flying machine worked on its first attempt, much less the most complicated one ever imagined, landing on another heavenly body on its maiden voyage, and returning roundtrip with a crew that lived to tell,
all with 1960's technology. (More computing power is found today in a $10 watch.)
According to William Kaysing, a NASA contractor for Apollo,
a classified interdepartmental memo rated the odds of a successful and survivable manned lunar landing on its first attempt at one in ten thousand. That is why the returning men of the mission looked so dejected rather than triumphant at their press conference,
as they were blackmailed into lying about the alleged greatest accomplishment of mankind, to the detriment of their own souls.
Sibrel has been interviewed, and his documentary about
the moon landings have been featured on, The Tonight Show,
The Daily Show, Geraldo at Large, The Abrams Report,
Coast to Coast, NBC, CNN, FOX, Time Magazine,
The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post
and USA Today.
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