Apollo 13

[iceworks]

I was reading Australian Sky and Telescope's article on Van Allen Belts( the radiation surrounding the earth), and the same day caught the movie Apollo 13. The movie mentioned that John Swigert died of cancer. He in fact died of bone cancer(I don't know what type) at the age of 51.
Does anyone know if his illness was related to his exposure to radiation in space, or know of :) any data on astronauts health vs. space travel.

[matt]

Interesting question.

Looking forward to the answer/s

[anthony2302749]

From my knowledge of the Apollo Program the Van Allens Belts posed very little threat to the astronauts. The Van Allen belts span about forty degrees of earth's latitude twenty degrees above and below the magnetic equator. The principle danger of the Van Allen belts is high-energy protons, which are not that difficult to shield against and the spacecraft course was plotted so that it would traversed that region of space very quickly so as to minimal exposure to radiation. The actual course of the spacecraft was three-dimensional. Each mission flew a slightly different trajectory in order to access its landing site, the orbital inclination of the translunar trajectory was always in the region of 30°. Stated another way, the geometric plane containing the translunar trajectory was inclined to the earth's equator by about 30°. A spacecraft following that trajectory would bypass all but the edges of the Van Allen belts minimising the amount of radiation an astronaut may receive. I don't think that the astronauts were exposed to enough radiation to cause cancer. Swigert's cancer was probably more earthly then heavenly.

[sheeny]

I started doing a bit of research on this this morning at work... but someone came along and actually distracted me with, can you believe it... some work!

This might be of interest:

http://www.lunaranomalies.com/rad.htm

Scroll down till you see Table 1. The paragraph following that I think says it all:
"While this table does not include the results from Apollo's 16 or 17, there is enough data to conclude that the actual radiation exposure that the astronauts endured was very small. It never came close to being lethal or even damaging."

Al.

[h0ughy]

wow there is some info in that lot:thumbsup: great research Al;)

[astro_nutt]

Watched the doco "Universe"..(BBC) a while back..in the second part.."Stars" it does mention some of the Apollo astronauts experiencing white flashes in their eyes..a study reveled that their spacecraft was bombarded with cosmic rays..charged particles moving at high speed..one part showed a electron microscope scan of a space helmut which had hundreds of hollow tubes from the cosmic rays burrowing through it!!..so I wonder how the folk in the ISS keep tabs on the cosmic rays...

[iceworks]

:) Makes one appreciate the ozone layer