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EARTHDATE: April 24, 2011

Official News page 4


REAL LIFE NEWS: SPACE TRAVEL CAUSES HEART ATTACKS

by Hazed

Here's a health scare that, unlike most you read about in the newspapers, won't cause a problem for you personally. But it could add one more problem to the long list plaguing the prospect of long space voyages.

Experiments with mice show that deep space travel could be bad for the heart. Bombarding rodents with an ion beam from a powerful atom-smasher mimicked the effect of cosmic space radiation. As a result, the mice developed artery damage.

Dr Dennis Kucik, a pathology professor, said "Cosmic radiation is very different from X-rays and other radiation found on Earth. The radiation risks of deep-space travel are difficult to predict, largely because so few people have been exposed."

He's right - so far, the only people to have left Earth's protective magnetic field are the 24 Apollo astronauts who visited the moon. That's a very small group, and none of them were out in space for very long, so it's impossible to draw conclusions about the dangers of space radiation from their trips.

But Kucik and his colleagues suspected that the high-energy high ions which permeate space beyond Earth orbit could well have noticeable health effects for those exposed during long voyages. They thought that iron ions might cause thickening of the artery walls, or atherosclerosis.

While it would have been nice to test this by sending some mice into deep space, this wasn't practical - think of the expense! - so instead they generated the right kind of radiation by using a powerful particle accelerator at the Brookhaven lab in New York, and placed a group of mice in the beam.

The result: the ion bombardment did, indeed, cause the negative health effects they had expected.

"At 13 weeks it was surprising and quite remarkable that we already could see permanent damage - an irreversible thickening of the artery wall where it had been exposed to radiation," said Janusz Kabarowski, one of Kucik's colleagues.

So when (or if) deep-space exploration begins, this study and others like it will have an effect on spaceship design, because something will have to be done to protect the astronauts from radiation.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/08/deep_space_ticker_risk/


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