COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 28, 2005

"Studying the effect of cosmic radiation on astronauts"

Presented By

NASA plans to launch new human expeditions to the moon between 2015-2020 and to Mars around 2025. One of the major "show-stoppers" in these missions is the uncertainty of the health risk that cosmic radiations pose on astronauts. Even though a growing body of data regarding the effects of cosmic radiation has been accumulated from the international space station for the past years, risk uncertainties remain high. In addition, little is known on the effect of relativistic charged particles, a major component of radiation in deep space far from the protective magnetic terrestrial field.

We will describe how the strong radiation biology tradition of LBNL led NASA to select this national laboratory as one of its specialized center of research and training for the past 15 years. In addition, this talk will show how students with a nuclear engineering background could join the NASA team at LBNL. Our research discussion will focus on explaining our current knowledge of cosmic radiation and how these charged particles interact with live tissue. Results from mouse and human cell models will be described, as well as some modeling efforts using Monte Carlo simulations.