LONDON: According to a statement from Colorado State University (CSU), NASA has provided the university with a $9 million grant to develop a new research center. The center will investigate the ramifications of long-term exposure to radiation in deep space, an essential prelude to any manned mission to Mars. The facility will be the only one in the world dedicated to this type of research.
The center will be converted from an existing gamma ray facility. The project, which will last for five years, will examine the effects of low doses of neutron radiation. The study of space radiation is crucial to NASA’s long-term ambitions, since radiation exposure rises as a mission goes on and no current spacecraft hull or spacesuit is capable of shielding astronauts from cosmic rays.
During the project, mice will be exposed to low doses of neutron radiation for as long as 400 days, doses similar to what astronauts will encounter on long missions. Astronauts’ tenures on the International Space Station are longer these days than in the past; furthermore, a manned Mars mission would take around three years.
The project will look at how neutron radiation affects the central nervous system and try to detect biomarkers that could indicate future chances of cancer after an astronaut returns to Earth. Although previous studies have space radiation is no more likely to lead to leukemia than radiation on Earth, other work has shown that space radiation is 50 times more effective at causing hepatocellular carcinoma, a liver cancer, than terrestrial radiation.
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