Mitigating Hazards of Space Travel

摘要

In his commentary "The Great Radiation Hoax" [Jan. 26, page 14] Robert Zubrin srepresented the nuances of the problem of radiation in space and the extensive efforts to understand the hazards quantitatively and how to mitigate them. We know a great deal about the radiation hazards of X-rays and gamma rays on Earth, but to extrapolate this information to space requires, as a first step, real knowledge about the units of radiation dose. It is relatively simple to determine these doses in space, where the radiation is composed of gamma rays, protons and all the other cosmic-ray particles from helium to iron nuclei with energies from one million to 150 billion electron volts.