Posted on 11/24/2008 5:49:31 PM PST by SunkenCiv
One of the gravest dangers facing future astronauts traveling to Mars will be radiation in space: If the long trip doesn't kill them, cancer eventually could.
These threats can, however, be defeated. In Star Trek, a deflector shield surrounded the Starship Enterprise, and radiation bounced off it. Now tests show it's possible to create a real deflector shield that would have the same effect.
A new study found that a portable magnetic shield could be the key to protecting spacefarers during long-duration missions. A spaceship could be outfitted with a mini magnetosphere that would force the harmful charged particles in space to curve around the ship, rather than hitting the people inside.
While this idea has been tossed around since the 1960s, most experts thought it couldn't work because the magnetic field required to produce the effect would need to be too large. But a new test in the laboratory showed the process seems to work on a smaller scale, too.
Ruth Bamford of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and her colleagues conducted tests on a miniature plasma field in the laboratory with similar properties to the wind of charged particles in space coming off of the sun (the source of much of the most harmful radiation to humans). When scientists set up a magnetic field inside this artificial solar wind, they found that the magnet created a bubble where no radiation could enter.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Obama is going to kill the space program
Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded!
Fascinating!
It is the human thing to do.
LOL!
wussy medical ship.
I never understood how such a big ship with a large crew could fly around like a fighter plane and fire a weapon from only one spot. What does the crew do when the ship flies upwards like that? I always thought that the Imperial Star Destroyers were more realistic.
bump
Seatbelts:-}
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