NASA's Curiosity rover begins new mission on Mars to protect visiting astronauts: Report

Since humans are determined to visit Mars and terraform it for permanent human settlement, being rey on all fronts is essential to ensure survival. Needless to say, red planet will t be welcoming to humans initially as its rough atmosphere will pose grave threats to visitors. Astronauts will be exposed to all sorts of riation as Mars does t have a magnetosphere to protect m from harsh riations and dely charged particles emerging from sun. To prepare astronauts for such conditions, NASA's Curiosity rover is providing new data with its riation sensor about health risks humans would face on surface. rover has begun its mission to identify potential protective prospects, which would shield astronauts from aforementioned harmful factors. 

Curiosity comes to rescue

Scientists with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover team, using  Riation Assessment Detector (R), are helping explore if lava tubes, caves, or subsurface habitats will offer a safe refuge for future astronauts on Mars. According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Curiosity’s R data has revealed that using natural materials such as rock and sediment on Mars could offer some protection from  ever-present riation. said data was collected from Sept. 9 to 21 in 2016, while rover was parked against a cliff at a location called “Murray Buttes”, as per a paper published in JGR Planets earlier this year.

Im: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

During its stay, R measured a 4% decrease in overall riation and a 7.5% decrease in neutral particle riation, including neutrons that can penetrate rock and are especially harmful to human health. Bent Ehresmann, le author of paper said as per JPL,

"We’ve been waiting a long time for right conditions to get se results, which are critical to ensure accuracy of our computer models. At Murray Buttes, we finally h se conditions and data to analyze this effect. We’re w looking for or locations where R can repeat se kinds of measurements."

Most of riation data produced by R are from cosmic rays, which are particles that emerged from exploding stars and get scattered throughout universe. Don Hassler, principal investigator of R instrument told JPL, "Cosmic rays, solar riation, solar storms, y are all components of wear, and R is effectively a wear outpost on surface of Mars". Scientists believe that ir kwledge about Martian landscapes and areas of higher riation will become clearer as sun has started to get more active. "More observations are needed to assess just how dangerous a really powerful solar storm would be to humans on Martian surface. R’s findings will feed into a much larger body of data being compiled for future crewed missions" said JPL in a report.

Im: Twitter/@MarsCuriosity