Volume 3, Issue 1

Original research papers

Radiation Protection

ASSESSMENT OF RADIATION EXPOSURE IN MANNED MISSIONS TO MARS FOR THREE PROFILES

Ana Luísa Casimiro, Jorge Miguel Sampaio, Patrícia Gonçalves

Pages: 27-33

DOI: 10.21175/RadJ.2018.01.006

Received: 15 APR 2017, Received revised: 30 JUN 2017, Accepted: 19 JUL 2017, Published online: 2 APR 2018

The biggest risks in a mission to Mars are the long periods of time with the lack of gravity, the psychological effects due to isolation, the risk of contamination by diseases in confined space, and exposure to high doses of radiation. It is recognized that the latter poses the greatest scientific and technological challenge to a viable mission. In this work, we present estimates of the equivalent dose in an astronaut for three mission-to-Mars profiles proposed by NASA. For this, we performed Monte Carlo simulations of the energy deposited in the ICRU sphere taking into account the main radiation sources in space using the Geant4 simulation toolkit. The results show that the introduction of 10 cm equivalent Al shielding significantly reduces the equivalent dose, although our estimates are still above the dose limits adopted by NASA. These results show, however, that the values are in the range for optimization in terms of shielding solutions, as well as the choice of the most appropriate mission trajectories to minimize the dose to astronauts.
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