Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Cutting-edge Approaches to Protecting Interplanetary Astronauts

Episode Date: April 30, 2012

As if extremes of temperature and lack of air weren’t enough! Some scientists believe it’s space radiation that will keep humans from venturing deep into our solar system. Not so, say three teams of NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC)-funded researchers. Each is exploring a cutting-edge approach to protecting astronauts on their way to Mars and other destinations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Space radiation, how we'll beat it, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Did you pack your sunscreen for that trip to Mars? I'm afraid you'll need something more. Deep space radiation may be the greatest challenge facing humans who want to go to the really interesting destinations in our solar system. In a special report, we'll talk to researchers who are creating new forms of shielding or deflection

that will open up deep space for men and women. Bill Nye is at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. He'll be back next week. Bruce Betts and Emily Lakdawalla are also part of our festival team, but I was able to talk to them before the big party began. We'll get a what's up report from Bruce later, but here's Emily with a very proud announcement. She is the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator,

but she's also put in long hours preparing for the launch of the Society's brand new website. Emily, it's a special show all around, so we're just going to take a really quick visit with you to hear about what we hope everybody is now visiting, the new Planetary.org. I am so excited about this change. It's been six and a half years since our last site upgrade and the internet is just completely different now and our new site reflects that. It's really a beautiful site. We hope that people will take a look. You have, you and a couple of other people at the Society in particular, have done an enormous

amount of work. I mean what's been involved just getting the blog transferred? It's a lot of tedious database movement. Find and Replace has become my friend. But the point is that I do have the entire blog archive is over. But really, this site is all about looking forward with new information, huge images, great video, and lots of interconnected linking so that now you can browse the blog by subject and you can look up great new space images and you can see all the great new space videos and find them much more easily than you used to be able to and this goes for the planetary radio archives as well doesn't it absolutely that's always been a good feature on our old site and it's going to be

even better on the new site because now you'll be able to actually find all the people who have been interviewed on planetary radio and see what else they've done with us. And quite a lot of them have been very involved with the Planetary Society in the past. Very cool. I am really looking forward to exploring it some more on my own. Listen, just one thing to mention out of the blog. You posted it on April 23rd. I love this so much. I have already watched it at least four times. Tell us about this little Voyager cartoon. I'm not even really sure where it came from, but it's a great animation of the continuing adventures of Voyager 2. And let's just say that they involve just about every single

fictional spacecraft that anybody has ever created. She says it is heart-wrenching, funny, and adorable. I would add brilliant. Watch for George Jetson driving by. Emily, thanks so much, and congratulations to you and your colleagues on this achievement. Thank you very much. She is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, and she'll be joining us next week from the National Air and Space Museum with Planetary Radio Live. Space is not a friendly place. It's very, very hot, at least when it's not very, very cold.

It lacks, what do you call it? Oh yeah, air. And it's really, really big. Even if we figure out how humans can deal with these challenges, one remains, that seemingly empty vacuum is loaded with lethal radiation, especially when you get beyond Earth's protective magnetosphere. There are those who have speculated that radiation will make robots the only practical option for ambitious missions of exploration. Not if our guests today have anything to say about it.

I met them about a month ago at the NIAC Spring Symposium in Pasadena, California. NIAC stands for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. The office funds research at the edge of science and technology, and even beyond that edge, sometimes. Scores of funding recipients gathered to share their findings over three days. We'll hear from just three who have dedicated themselves to protecting men and women on long-duration flights and continuing that protection as they set up camp on Mars or elsewhere. Sheila Thiebaud and Catherine Fay are colleagues at NASA's Langley Research Center. Together they are investigating a new type of material that appears to offer great promise,

not just as radiation shielding, but as something you can build a spaceship out of. Correct me if I'm wrong. We may actually be able to spin and weave ourselves out of the challenge of deep space radiation. That is true. I think that is true. We are working on an exciting material system. Kathy is the BNNT expert and BNNT is boron nitride nanotubes and I am the radiation shielding expert and we have joined forces to try to invent a material system that we believe will be dramatic in helping with the radiation shielding problem. And the reason we think that it will be dramatic is because what we are developing is not only radiation shielding, but structural. And we can use it for building the structures that go into space.

Because, as you said, you've got to build them out of something. Exactly. Kathy, the carbon nanot you've got to build them out of something. Exactly. Kathy, the carbon nanotubes most of us have heard about, similar structure but very different material. Yes, boron nitride nanotubes are an insulator. Carbon nanotubes are electrically conducting. There's also new advanced nanomaterials in between, which are very promising, a BCN material.

There are many good things about boron nitride nanotubes, but because they are very long tubes, they can be spun, as you have said, into textiles. And we've already have people interested, like NanoComp makes carbon nanotube yarns. They are also interested in making boron nitride nanotube yarns and sheets. So when you get the government and technologies from the government transferred to industry where they can scale up things for you and make these large structures feasible, then this is a very good thing for the community. And carbon nanotubes extremely strong but you also showed a graph that showed that these, this material is also tremendously strong.

Yes, we're 95% of the strength of carbon nanotubes, so we're very comparable in that. However, we do have a greater temperature capability, so that puts us in a different class because our materials are thermally stable up to 800 degrees C in air. And very cold as well, I heard. Yes, the temperature range typically for the space environment is quoted at negative 57 C to the higher temperatures, and so we operate very well in that whole environment that is considered for space. Sheila Thiebaud and Catherine Fay of the Langley Research Center. Shane Westover and his team are at the Johnson Space Center outside of Houston.

They are looking at another way of protecting humans from space radiation, but it's a technique that comes with big challenges of its own. Shane, my guess is that, certainly for myself and I bet for my audience as well, the approach that your team is taking may be the one that more people have heard about compared to the other two presentations we heard today, and that's this use of superconducting magnets? DR. That's right. This is an age-old concept that's been looked at for many decades. And we wanted to take a fresh look at it.

There's always been a lot of questions in terms of its viability, its feasibility, some unanswered questions in some of the papers. And so we wanted to go look at what the state-of-the-art superconductor offers today from a similar type of concept and try and address some of the questions that have been out there over the years. No question there are some major challenges which you talked about in your presentation. That's right. Some of the challenges are that you can start getting into very large massive systems to create some of these shields. And what we see also is that the passive solutions also become very large when you're talking about longer duration missions.

That's what we need to look at is a comparable with passive solution. Even though these active solutions are much more complex can we get the mass down and can we have a good handle on the risks associated with the complex system to to go make this a feasible approach so major challenges but I still heard some really fascinating things and the approach the actual superconducting coil could be a sort of fabric. Well, the coil itself is not a fabric. The superconductor is ceramic in nature. It's very thin tapes. However, what we do to hold those tapes in a helical coil fashion

is wrap it in a blanket of sorts that's sandwiched. That helps us maintain its shape when we start charging it, and also helps us work with an expandability concept that we're looking at here with this second generation high-temperature superconductor. The other thing that I kind of went, oh, duh, is that even though you're talking about rather large amounts of current, 40,000 amps, I think you said, it's not like you have to have this gigantic generator because you can charge that over time? That's right. There's a lot of folks that look at these and say, wow, there's going to be a lot of power required to run this system. That's not actually true. If

we use a concept that's been used before with some of the low temperature superconductors, you can pump these over days to get to its final charge. So it doesn't require huge solar arrays or nuclear power to do this. This is very feasible. And we need to talk about thermal concepts now. That's when the power starts to make a play and we need to talk about thermal concepts. Now that's when the power starts to make a play, and we need to go look at that. That's Shane Westover of the Johnson Space Center telling us about research into using superconducting magnets to deflect space radiation from delicate astronaut bodies. But there appears to be another way to turn around those energetic particles before most of them can get through the walls of a spacecraft or a habitat on the

surface of, say, Mars. This technique is being worked on by Ram Tripathi of the Langley Research Center. So we all have some familiarity with static electricity, and I miss my old static, I think it was a Wimshurst static generator. Are we talking about basically a scaled-up version of something like that? Yes. I mean, principle remains the same. You know, there's no new principle physics-wise. Of course, similar charges repel each other, and dissimilar charges, positive and negative, attract each other. So basic principle physics is the same. You showed the results of some computer modeling, which appeared to show that this might be a very effective way to

deflect these particles, this radiation. Absolutely we have done the real calculations which the environment, the space radiation environment we take is the ones which we use in day-to-day study in space missions which are launched today. So those are the real calculations we have effectively showed that this is the best technology you can have. At the minimum, as I said, that it was minimum 75% more effective, but it can be even several times more effective than material shielding. So it's extremely effective.

And given that, also that it avoids quite a bit of biological uncertainty of continuous radiation. So that's a bonus. And that's basically the name of the game here. So I'll ask you to speculate. If you look out some number of years, and this is now in practice being used to protect humans, what would we actually find on a spacecraft surrounding that little habitat where people are on their way to Mars or wherever? In habitat, you know, in Moon and Mars, this is no issue at all because electrostatic ceiling works perfect.

You know, all you can do is kind of place amaryllis there. Oh, so that would be like for a base. Yeah, base, right. But on the way, basically in spacecraft, you can strategically design and basically launch, you know, as I was trying to show, there's that kind of gossamer type. You'd inflate, you know, I mean, basically because of charges, they get deployed when you want. If you don't want, you just kind of hold them back if you don't want. So that's kind of very flexible. It gives all the flexibility there. And also you can use

you know, where you want to use. So that's extremely viable technology, which flexibility doesn't exist in other active options. Is the power source for this generating this field any kind of issue? No, not really, because that's one of the factors, of course, we are trying to optimize. But the power requirement is not an issue, because remember when these gas-fuel structures are deployed, we are leveraging against solar cells also there, so that we can roll the power which is needed.

I try to show that power requirement is pretty minimal, particularly space radiation. So it is well within the grasp and that's what we are looking here. I just want to finish with that. You used that phrase, gossamer structure, both just now and in your presentation. This is really something that is rather low mass.

Oh, absolutely. This is kind of if you want to call this, the gossamer structures have been NASA's blue-eyed baby, you know, and they have been used for many other missions. And we are leveraging against that technology because they are kind of flimsy and have a very light structure. You know, the payload is the name of the game. If you don't get off the ground, you are not in business. So you just leverage against that and leverage against the solar cells also. You roll everything together and put two and two together, and then you're in business and ready to go. Ram Tripathi of the Langley Research Center. When we return, we'll talk with all of these scientists who hope to make space a safe place for human explorers. This is Planetary Radio.

I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications

like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. It's amazing what brilliant minds, innovative concepts, and a little money can sometimes accomplish. We're talking with representatives of three teams that are learning how to protect humans from lethal space radiation. On trips to Mars or elsewhere in our vast solar system, each is researching a different technique, thanks to support from NIAC, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Office.

After hearing from them individually, I decided to bring them together during a break at NIAC's Spring Symposium in Pasadena, California. Here again are Sheila Thiebaud, Shane Westover, and Ram Tripathi. After hearing from all three of you about the quite different techniques, the approaches that you're taking to solving this problem, I wanted to get the three of you together because really I think the most important message out of these three presentations is that there's hope for us humans out there on long duration flights. Sheila, is that the feeling you get? That's the feeling that I have. Now, we've been studying this for decades, and radiation dose, or dose equivalent for humans, it's accumulative, and it's energy dependent. There are a lot of high energy particles out there.

So if you can slow them down, if you can stop them, any way you can go about doing this, that's what we need to do and I personally believe that it's going to take more than one technique that are additive to help solve this problem. It is a huge problem but I do believe it's a solvable problem at this point. Dr. Tripathi, let me pick that up with you because you mentioned as well, we may find that a hybrid approach, as Sheila's mentioning, may be the best solution. Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons, you know, the showstopper for long-duration space missions is that the

biological effects for continuous radiation on human tissues is not known at all. No study exists here on Earth or anywhere, neither in vitro or in vivo. Given that uncertainty, the best strategy, of course, is to avoid the radiation from going there so you don't have the problem to start with. So active shielding has to be a very important ingredient if we are able to succeed in deep space human missions. Now that, of course, any spacecraft is always made of material.

So material shielding will always be ingredient. You cannot make any spacecraft in air, and then combination of all things is the best solution. But, again, I would like to reemphasize that avoiding radiation from hitting the spacecraft, creating safe zone is the key. Shane, you also talked about a hybrid approach. Yeah, we look at the active solutions. And of course, there's a lot of mass that's required to hold these magnets in place and to address some of the risks associated with them. Do the three of you see this as something which is not just a, I think you used the term,

Nyacky approach, Shane, which everyone loved, got a good laugh out of, but something that is going to result in a practical means for humans to spend the kinds of times we're talking about, let's say, for a Mars mission, in a reasonable time frame, let's say 15, 20 years. Actually, I think that is one of the biggest benefits from this NIAC program is that you can receive funding to start at a low TRL level and to have...

I'm sorry, TRL? TRL, Technical Readiness Level. And this is a scale we use within NASA, and the system is rated from TRL 1 up to 9. If it's TRL 9, it's on orbit. It's in space. It's flying. But when you're back in the laboratory with a concept,

that's TRL 1. And so the NIAC funding starts out with low TRL and gives you time to really try to solve the problem with a long-range innovative solution. And not all programs are that way. Some programs want you to start at a higher TRL and solve it in two years. But for the things that I'm working on and Ram and Shane are working on, we need more than a couple of years. Shane, you were going to add something, but I'm also wondering about the role of NIAC in being able to get this early stage research

underway. Yeah, with what you had asked before, I think get this early stage research underway? Yeah, with what you had asked before, I think what's really important is many people recognize the challenges associated with this environment and putting humans outside the Earth's magnetosphere. And so you talk about going to Mars, and I think we're going to have to do a lot of learning before we get there. We're going to have to try and demonstrate some of these solutions, try and get smarter with how to work with some of these solutions,

and do these at Lagrangian points or maybe much closer asteroids or something, but local deep space. Ram, how important has the NIAC support been to your work? The NIAC program has been absolutely critical. It is this program I love most because it gives total flexibility on whatever basically you like to do. And the management is very cooperative in adjusting basically what you want to do as you go on. Had it not been for NIAC, we would not have been here where we are. And I think if that continues, we have the know-how, and I'm sure definitely we can succeed and definitely get there sooner. 15 years is what you say my target is to get within 10 years.

Good for you. And I hope that amongst the three of you, and maybe with all three of you and others, and with support from groups like NIAC, that this is achieved. Thank you so much for taking a couple of minutes and giving us a little bit of hope for long-duration human spaceflight. Ram Tripathi does his work on radiation deflection with static electric fields at NASA's Langley Research Center. That's also where Sheila Thiebaud and her colleague Catherine Fay are perfecting unique radiation shielding materials. And Sean Westover is with the team at the Johnson Space Center that is working with superconducting magnets to deflect radiation. Our thanks to NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Office for making them available. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts. Bruce, a pleasure to talk to you once again.

As people hear this, we probably have just come back from the USA Science and Engineering Festival, and I hope that people will tune in to hear Planetary Radio Live with you and me and a bunch of other folks. I'm sure we had a great time. Right. We're recording this a little bit early. Tell us, what's up in the night sky? Venus still dominating over there in the west after sunset, high up, as bright as it gets in its eight-year cycle, which is really, really bright.

We've also got Mars high in the south, dimming, but still looking like a bright star. And if you look, it has a nice pairing with the bright star Regulus. And Mars is on the left, Regulus is over to the right. And we also have a pairing with Saturn, Saturn over in the early evening over in the east. And if you look also to the right from Saturnurn you'll see the bright star spica it was 10 years ago that the aqua earth observing satellite was launched joined the the whole group of earth observing satellites and what they call the a-train get on the a-train yeah moving on random space fact oh. I love the passion. I scared the dog.

Sorry. It's okay. You're a good dog. She's back asleep. The Aqua Earth Observing Satellite we were just talking about has a dry mass of about three metric tons. Its buddy, Terra, also in the A-train, is about four and a half tons. A-train, is about four and a half tons. It's very common for Earth satellites to be much more massive than their planetary cousins. Even Cassini, which is a behemoth by planetary standards, has dry mass of about two and a half tons. They obviously, they used a heck of a lot of fuel

as well getting out there. And most of your planetary spacecraft have dry masses, meaning without the fuel, of around a ton. Fascinating. Thank you. I thought Cassini would, I just assumed it would have been bigger than these guys, but it's nice and comfy in low Earth orbit. It is. Not surprisingly, you can boost a lot more when you don't have to get it out to Saturn. Yeah. Moving on to the trivia contest, we asked you what is unusual about the tail section of the shuttle carrier aircraft compared to normal 747s. How'd we do, Matt? Wow, big response. I suppose it may have had to do with the prize this week, which is the Free Talk and Skype Buddy Video Chat Pack, which has been won by Valerie Lemoine.

Valerie of Stockton, California. She hasn't won for a couple of years, as far as I can tell. She said vertical stabilizers were added to the tail to aid stability. They're hard to miss. A lot of people commented on how really ugly they are. Wow. It's an airplane. It's designed to fly.

Yeah, they needed more vertical stability because they stuck that big space shuttle in the middle of the airstream. Other people like John Gallant talked about other modifications that were made, but of course you wanted the ones that were obvious from the outside, and those were those stabilizers.

John, among other things, said that a crew escape tunnel system was installed. They took it out after the early approach and landing test because, get this, they were worried about possible engine ingestion of an escaping crew member. Ow. And there is some other really fun stuff here, like what's going to happen with these 747s.

They're going to be used as spare parts for SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, working out of Dryden here in California. Got a really interesting comment from Ben Owens, who said that, you know, there were worries about the stabilizers because, you know, a similar stabilizer broke loose on Luke Skywalker's X-Wing Starfighter during the Death Star Trench Run. It was the Battle of Yavin. Fortunately, R2-D2 was there. I don't know if he was on the shuttle carrier or not. It's not R2, but it is another R2 unit.

That's good. Probably not as plucky, but I'm sure he did the job. Just one other person I want to mention, James Clark, who did get the answer correct but was not chosen by Random.org. James Clark, who did get the answer correct but was not chosen by Random.org. But James sent a neat photo because he lives very close to the Kennedy Space Center runway. And so he sent a nice photo of the shuttle on the back of the shuttle carrier because he is, in fact, as we speak, he may have been deployed to Afghanistan. I think we can afford to send James a T-shirt, don't you?

Oh, yeah. That sounds good. All right, how about next week? All right, for next week I return to the similar topic because now they're flying Enterprise around. And so my question for you is how many flights did the Space Shuttle Enterprise make separated from the carrier aircraft? So how many free drops, how many landings did it have on its own? Go to planetary.org slash radio to find out how to enter. And you have this time until 2 p.m. on Monday, May 7, to get us your entry. All right, Guy, thank you once again.

All right, thank you, everybody. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about rope. Thank you, and good night. You know, it's a little-known fact that R2 used a piece of rope to tie down that stabilizer. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up.

Have you heard about the high-powered asteroid miners? The entire space sector is abuzz about planetary resources. The newly announced company that has set its sights on the abundant resources available from space rocks. All they have to do is figure out how to put them within reach and how to get those minerals down here on Earth. About half the company principals and advisors are past guests of this show, and you can bet we'll be hitting them up for a look behind the

scenes of their, to say the least, ambitious plans. If I sound skeptical, I don't mean to. Even if it takes 20 years, even if they never achieve their goal, this effort is going to advance space technology and science in ways we can barely imagine, and possibly in ways we can't imagine. I wonder if they'll be looking for some good radiation protection. Join us next week for Planetary Radio Live at the National Air and Space Museum. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.