Students have designed a lunar shield with the ability to protect colonists from radiation.
Credit: North Carolina State University
BRISBANE: The first astronauts to return to the Moon could be shielded from cosmic and solar radiation with a flexible covering designed by university students.
Michael Sieber, Anne Tomasevitch and Ryan Boyle, textile engineering students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, U.S., were challenged by their professor to design the multi-layered, multi-purpose Lunar TexShield as part of their third-year classes.
The TexShield won the students second prize in a NASA competition, called the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage, and Sieber hopes that they will continue to develop the design.
Challenges to lunar colony
Cosmic rays and radiation from solar flares are some of the many challenges NASA must overcome before the planned return to the Moon in 2020.
Because the Moon lacks an atmosphere and protective magnetic field, there can be 100 times as much radiation on the Moon as on Earth. With longer Moon missions, and even a permanent base planned, this has the potential to cause problems ranging from cancer to damage to sensitive electronics.
Creating a shield-like 'moon blanket' to cover lunar living and working quarters could keep doses of ionising radiation within the standards set by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Sieber said.
The TexShield blanket is made of layers of a nylon polymer containing radiation-absorbing metal compounds, including lead sulphide, boron oxide and barium sulphate, and layers of Demron fabric, which is already used to protect against radiation in medical applications.
Solar panels
The outer layer of the TexShield would be made of flexible solar panels that can generate electricity for astronauts, Sieber said. The design is lightweight enough to carry in a space shuttle and because it's so flexible, could be used to protect habitation modules, sleeping shelters or large machinery.
The students were able to test a prototype with a gamma-ray spectrometer, Sieber said, but further testing with neutron and proton radiation would give a better model of the level of protection.
Roger Clay, a physicist at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, said that designing an effective shield would be tricky because of the nature of cosmic radiation, however. "If you [don't have enough] mass, there is some danger of actually increasing the radiation dose for the galactic cosmic rays since they multiply in material," he said.
