10-03-2015, 09:15 PM
(10-03-2015, 02:30 PM)Pye-rate Wrote: My physicist friend tells me from what he has read in professional journals that in Mars gravity one would need only spend about fours a day at one-G to maintain health. He agrees that not enough is known about partial-G enviroments to be certain.
My idea for cosmic rays, a Faraday dome. An inflatable translucent dome with embedded wires to create a magnetic field. Build settlement, cover with dome, inflate with Mars air, 1.5 Mars atmospheres should be enough.
Yes, if your physicist friend has read that, I guarantee the author he was reading has made a wild-ass guess. I've researched this pretty extensively, and the actual space medical community hasn't the foggiest idea what the long-term effects of 1/3 G would be (especially developmental effects, i.e., gestation, infancy, and childhood).
A Faraday cage/dome will not stop cosmic rays. We're talking about massive ions (e.g. iron) zipping along at relativistic speeds. They wouldn't even notice such a puny magnetic field. A strong magnetic field causes their paths to slowly bend, and over hundreds or thousands of km, you can get a shielded area in the middle... but this requires a magnetic field that extends hundreds or thousands of km.
An extremely strong field could bend their paths in a shorter distance, of course, but now we're talking about things like giant superconducting electromagnets, and it's all theoretical.
A couple meters (5-10 tons/m^2) of matter is certainly cheaper and easier for any permanent colony. Electromagnetic shielding, if we can ever get it to work, might make more sense for ships though, where every gram counts.
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier