Mars-Bound Rover Begins Monitoring Space Radiations

The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument aboard the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft has been turned on, allowing experts at the American space agency to measure radiation levels around the probe as it is beginning its 8-month travel to the Red Planet.

Knowing how much radiation is in space – and especially between Mars and Earth – is especially important to NASA because the space agency plans to send manned missions there. As such, these measurements are critical for future space exploration.

RAD is uniquely equipped – of all 10 instruments on the MSL – to conduct such investigations. It can detect both atomic and subatomic particles, originating either in distant supernovae, the Sun, or in a wide array of other sources.

MSL mission controllers, who are based at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, say that the instrument will continue to collect data on the radiation environment between Earth and Mars for at least another 8 months.

The mission launched on November 26, aboard an Atlas V delivery system, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), in Florida. Arrival at Mars is currently scheduled for August 2012.

One of the things that differentiates RAD from any other radiation-measuring instrument deployed to space in the past is the fact that it is not located outside the MSL aeroshell, but rather aboard the rover Curiosity itself.

This means that it is protected by various other components and shields. What this implies is that it will measure radiations from the perspective of a human explorer located aboard a shielded spacecraft. Such a study has never been conducted before.

“RAD is serving as a proxy for an astronaut inside a spacecraft on the way to Mars. The instrument is deep inside the spacecraft, the way an astronaut would be,” researcher Don Hassler explains.

“Understanding the effects of the spacecraft on the radiation field will be valuable in designing craft for astronauts to travel to Mars,” adds the scientist, who is the principal investigator for the RAD instrument. He is based at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), in Boulder, Colorado.

By now, the MSL spacecraft has already traveled around 31.9 million miles (51.3 million kilometers) of its trip to Mars. In all, the probe is expected to cover 352 million miles (567 million kilometer).