Shields up! Force fields could protect Mars missions

[Jarvamundo (Alex)]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-missions.html

NASA is nervous about sending astronauts to Mars - and understandably so. Six months' exposure to the wind of high-energy particles streaming from the sun could indeed prove deadly. But a team of researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, UK, has hit upon a phenomenon that might just solve the problem.

That subtlety has come to light through a series of discoveries made by roaming spacecraft. We initially thought that the only magnetospheres in the solar system belonged to bodies large enough to keep an iron core molten and churning. But it turns out that our solar system is littered with small but surprisingly powerful magnetic shields.

The moon is not the only place where this happens. Mars, for instance, has localised pockets of magnetic field left over from when it was hot enough to generate its own magnetosphere.

Even more exciting is a discovery that NASA's Galileo spacecraft made in the early 1990s. En route to Jupiter, it flew by the asteroids Ida and Gaspra, tiny rocks about 30 and 20 kilometres across respectively. Contrary to all expectations, both bodies were found to sport weak magnetic fields.

2010: http://www.newscientist.com/articlev...-missions.html

1900:http://www.museumsnett.no/alias/HJEM.../CST%20647.JPG