Scientists at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are working on creating a "Star Trek"-like deflector shield to protect humans travelling to Mars and other planets from receiving dangerously high doses of harmful radiation.
NASA and various other groups are currently working on projects that hope to send humans to Mars. Some of these projects even aim at establishing a human settlement on the Martian surface. While much work is being conducted on getting humans to Mars, little consideration is being paid to protect humans from these harmful radiations they would be subjected to. Therefore, scientists at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are currently working on creating a "Star Trek"-like deflector shield to protect humans travelling to Mars and other planets from receiving dangerously high doses of harmful radiation. If humans are not provided with such protection, they would be exposed easily to radiation poisoning that could lead to diarrhea, continuous vomiting and even death.
Eddie Semones, a radiation health expert at NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center, told CNN that shields to completely block all harmful radiation would need to be extremely thick and too heavy to be used in a spacecraft. However, the "Star Trek"-like deflector shield scientists are currently working on claims to be light-weighted. Although shielding technology has not quite reached the level portrayed in Star Trek, but the British scientists say they're working on reaching such levels.
"Star Trek has great ideas -- they just don't have to build it," Ruth Bamford, lead researcher for the deflector shield project at RAL, told CNN. "The radiation problem is a potential showstopper. I'm very concerned that the radiation issue is not being addressed very publicly and it's absolutely key."
Currently, scientists working on the new deflector have created a "mini magnetosphere" that essentially recreates the protection provided by the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetosphere has been used to protect a scale spacecraft from radiation and scientists are now concentrating on creating a concept spacecraft, called Discovery, with a full-scale magnetosphere that could theoretically take humans to Mars.
