If we want to colonize other planets, that means sending human astronauts there. But they have to first get there, and that means being bombarded with radiation for months, or years, depending on the destination. That's always been a worrisome prospect.
We know that ionizing radiation is bad for us, affecting our DNA and putting us at risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. At least, we thought we knew that for sure until this latest study.
Images courtesy: NASA
Research published in Scientific Reports yesterday found that excessive exposure to the Sun's harmful rays isn't necessarily correlated to increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease. It's an encouraging find, given that we've long assumed exposure to high levels of that kind of radiation is a death sentence for astronauts.
There are some caveats however. Lead researcher Robert Reynolds from Mortality Research & Consulting in California insisted that shorter missions where they're exposed to high levels of radiation prevalent in space should be okay. But longer duration missions away from Earth's protective magnetic field could still be dangerous. And that comes into play when we talk about colonizing even nearby planets like Mars.
At the very least, the historical data they studied implies that even longer missions into Earth-orbit, like that of Scott Kelly aboard the ISS for two years, shouldn't result in increased chances of cancer or cardiovascular disease.
Deep space exploration however would expose them to higher levels of radiation for long periods, something we have to consider for future plans. We need to be able to build spaceships and suits capable of blocking out this radiation while in transit.?
One possibility also suggested has been to gene-edit astronauts heading into the great beyond so they're impervious to the effects of cosmic radiation. Identifying just which genes could do that though is a daunting task, and we have no idea what kind of other side effects such a change might cause.
Without it, we'd be sending astronauts to an early grave as we send them to Mars.