Scientists Work To Produce 'Star Trek' Deflector Shields

cold fjord writes "This might be useful. From CNN: 'Recent evidence from NASA's Curiosity rover mission to the Red Planet has revealed that astronauts on the round-trip would be exposed to high levels of radiation from cosmic rays and high-energy particles from the sun ... this would clearly be bad for your health — and it is proving difficult to find a solution. ... [S]hielding to completely block the radiation danger would have to be "meters thick" and too heavy to be used aboard a spacecraft. In contrast, ... science fiction fans have once again got used to the ease with which Captain Kirk gives the order for "shields up" and the crew of the Enterprise being protected instantly from the hostility of space. Perhaps though, a real Star Trek shield may no longer be science fiction — scientists at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) certainly think so. They have been testing a lightweight system to protect astronauts and spacecraft components from harmful radiation and working with colleagues in America to design a concept spaceship called Discovery that could take astronauts to the Moon or Mars. "Star Trek has great ideas — they just don't have to build it," said Ruth Bamford, lead researcher for the deflector shield project at RAL. ... The RAL plan is to create an environment around the spacecraft that mimics the Earth's magnetic field and recreates the protection we enjoy on the ground — they call it a mini magnetosphere." Related: 'Deflector Shields' protect the Lunar Surface.'"

Picture

[daniel.garcia.romero]

Amazing picture at the end of the article, be sure to not miss it.

Re:Star Trek?

[wagnerrp]

Because Star Trek actually got it right that you would need shields for basic space travel, not just combat.

star trek had two types of shields

[yincrash]

deflector shields (which was emitted by the deflector dish) which were low powered and meant to deflect small particles and radiation, and defensive shields which were to protect against weapons and were emitted by various shield emitters on the hull. The summary really badly conflates the two.

Re:Pardon my ignorance

[Captain Hook]

Space shuttles are low earth orbit only, they never leave Earths Magnetosphere anyway.

Moon capsules did leave the Earths Magnetosphere but weren't shielded. They were protected by limited time in space (2 weeks at most) and luck that they weren't hit by decent solar storm.

Re:Micrometeorites

[Rockoon]

Calculate the area of the 2D projection of a ship onto a plane perpendicular to its line of motion, multiply by the length of space traversed to get swept volume...

Once you realize that this volume is always going to be enormous for any inter-planetary travel, even for a really really tiny craft, then you stop wondering why sometimes a probe that we send out suddenly stops responding for no obvious reason.

Re:one more proof of the moon hoax?

[khallow]

The Apollo missions had deep space radiation exposure of around 7-10 days. Their radiation solutions (which mostly amounted to not launching during a solar flare) aren't going to extend to journeys which last much longer than that.

Well, sorta

[Moraelin]

Well, sorta. If you do enough technobabble and you're willing to count close enough as a hit, then getting it right isn't that hard.

Point in case, in ST's case the Navigational Deflector (emitted by the deflector dish) was actually supposed to protect against space debris, micro-meteorites, etc. (Still a good idea, mind you, because when you're moving even close enough to the speed of light, a single grain of sand packs more energy than a broadside from a 20'th century battleship.)

Dealing with particles via magnetic field was actually the job of the Bussard Collectors (you know, those red glowing things at the front of the nacelles), a.k.a., ramscoops. Which actually didn't deflect it, but collected all that mostly hydrogen in the ship's path.

So, yeah, if you make a complete hash of which did what, and how, and still call it a ST deflector shield, yeah, you can count it as a hit.

But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." :p

(And yes, I'm a huge ST and SW nerd. I know, I know, I'll go not get laid now.;)

Martian radiation levels

[peter303]

The Curiostiy RAD experiement Principal Investigation gave a talk about Martian radiation 6/26 in Denver.
- 90% of the enroute radiation was from cosmic rays, the rest from solar flares. However a large solar storm could exceed cosmic ray levels.
- The eight month trip resulted in over 300 milliseverts of radiation, about one third of the recommend lifetime human dose.
- The thin Martian atmosphere greatly attenuates the surface radiation. But its still much higher than Earth.
- Hydrogen rich materials like water or certain plastics are useful barriers against cosmic rays. The ISS current has plastic shielded sleeping areas (to wait out solar storms too). It has been suggested to store fresh and waste water in the walls where the astronauts live and work.

Re:star trek had two types of shields

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Enterprise had three types of shields.

First was a set of low power static shields designed to deflect really small particles away from the ship during travel. Imagine a speck of dust striking the hull at full impulse speed.

Second was the deflector dish that emits a deflector beam designed to push bigger particles away from the ship during travel, particles too big for the static shields. Imagine a pebble striking the hull at full impulse speed.

Finally there are the main defensive shields used to shield the ship's hull from weapons fire and anything else the other two deflector systems cannot handle. It uses the most power and is implemented via shield emitters embedded throughout the hull.

Engineering

[celticryan]

Active shielding (as opposed to passive shielding that uses more mass of materials) is not a new idea [1]. The Rutherford Appleton Group every other year or so contacts NASA saying, look what we can do. Annoyingly, they do the contacting of NASA through the State department occasionally... NASA looks at their design, says "Uh huh, have you done a tech. demo yet?"
RAL says, "Yes, here are the results."
NASA says, "Yes, but this is for 10 MeV electrons. Which are not really part of the space radiation problem. Where are the higher energy proton and heavy ion results?"
RAL says, "..."

Space radiation protection is fundamentally different from terrestrial radiation protection. Space radiation is much higher energy and consists mainly of protons (but also heavy ions are important due to the Z^2 effect of radiation dose). And it is omnipresent - you cannot get away from space radiation - it is everywhere.

See, the problem with the unconfined magnetic field work is that the size and mass of the equipment to make a magnetic dipole against cosmic rays is prohibitive. The most recent analysis that I know of is by Paluzek [2] and needs a million kg in equipment with a diameter of 100 meters...

A nice review of the science and engineering aspects of active shielding can be found in Townsend (2005) [1].

[1] Townsend, L.W., "Critical analysis of active shielding methods for space radiation protection," Aerospace Conference, 2005 IEEE , vol., no., pp.724,730, 5-12 March 2005, doi: 10.1109/AERO.2005.1559364
[2] M. A. Paluszek, “Magnetic Radiation Shielding forPermanent Space Habitats,” in The Industrialization of Space: Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Meeting, American Astronautical Society,36 Part 1, 545-574, 1978.

Re:Well, sorta

[JoshuaZ]

But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."

This is clearly much more than an endorsement of binary. This is clearly a moral condemnation of any error correcting code that works any way other than just repeating each bit some constant number of times. Hamming codes must be of the devil.