June 19, 2009 -- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which blasted off for the moon on Thursday, will not only scout out safe spots for astronauts to land, it will let them know how the harsh radioactive environment might impact their bodies.
LRO is carrying patches of fake human tissue that will help NASA assess radiation risks to future crews and develop countermeasures.
The spacecraft's primary job is to spend a year taking high-resolution images of the moon's surface so NASA can find safe and scientifically interesting places to land future crews.
The United States is planning to return astronauts to the moon in 2020, about 50 years after the pioneering Apollo missions of 1969-72.
The agency plans to keep its crews on the moon far longer than the Apollo voyages and also travel beyond the equatorial zone where all six of the Apollo moon landings occurred.
"That part of the radiation environment has not been well observed in the past," said Boston University's Harlan Spence, the lead scientist for LRO's Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation, or CRaTER instrument. "There's a huge difference between being in low-Earth [orbit] and deep space."
Crews aboard the International Space Station and the space shuttle, which fly about 225 miles above Earth, are shielded by Earth's magnetic field and particles escaping from the planet's atmosphere.
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"When you get about a tenth of the way to the moon, you're basically in deep space and at those altitudes we really don't have a good idea of how radiation interacts with human tissue," Spence said.
CRaTER was turned on about an hour after launch to begin collecting data about how radiation fields change as they pass through sensors layered within patches of synthetic human tissue. Scientists will then use the information to determine how the radiation might increase cancer and other health risks.
The experiment is expected to operate full-time throughout LRO's year-long mapping mission and possibly throughout a planned two- to three-year follow-on science mission.
"We're able to see how the primary cosmic radiation would come through, for instance, the hull of a spacecraft, encounter the first little bit of human tissue, go through the small volume of human tissue, look at how the radiation field has evolved, and then finally all the way to the depth that would be equivalent to, say, a blood-forming organ," Spence told Discovery News.
LRO and a companion spacecraft called LCROSS, which will look for water in a lunar crater, are the robotic precursor missions to a new human space initiative known as Constellation, which is intended to extended human presence in space beyond low-Earth orbit, beginning with the moon and eventually including Mars, asteroids and other destinations.
"Our knowledge of the whole moon is actually quite poor," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager. "We have much better maps of Mars than we do of our own moon."
Related Links:
Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation
Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite
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