Van allen belt?

Question

The belt protects us from the harmful radiation of the sun, so what protects the astronaughts when travelling beyond it's confines

Answer 1

The roof of the movie studio.

Answer 2

The Van Allen Belt gives off radiation the radiation dosage per year is about 2500 rem, assuming one is shielded by 1 gr/cm-square of aluminum (about 1/8" thick plate) then there would be no danger to an astronaught. If they are in the space vehicle, whether it is the space station or one of space shuttles they do not travel through the Van Allen Belt as it is 4000 miles above the surface of the Earth. The voyages to the moon were done inside a space vehicle, Apollo etc, and the astronoughts were protected by the space vehicles outer shell. If you were to float in space just in a spacesuit inside the Van Allen Belt you would be bombarded by radiation. This would be harmful over a long period of time, but most EVA's carried out by astronaughts are very short and the exposure to the harmful radiation is limited.

Proponents of the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax have argued that space travel to the moon is impossible because the Van Allen radiation would kill or incapacitate an astronaut who made the trip. Van Allen himself, now deceased (August 9, 2006), dismissed these ideas. In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation. Astronauts who visited the moon probably have a slightly higher risk of cancer during their lifetimes, but still remain unlikely to become ill because of it.

Answer 3

The premise that the astronauts space suits could have helped at Chernobyl just shows how little some people know about radiation.

The van-allen belts are composed mainly of charged particles captured by the Earths magnetic field. These particles are alpha and beta particles and can be stopped quite well by a thin layer of aluminium (aluminum). The radiation at Chernobyl was Gamma radiation which needs may meters (feet) of a dense material to reduce or stop the radiation penetrating.

Astronauts spent a tiny proportion of the total flight time in the belts and received little more than a couple of chest x-rays worth of radiation.

Answer 4

check out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_Belt

There is a proposal by the late Robert L. Forward called HiVolt which may be a way to drain at least the inner belt to 1% of its natural level within a year. The proposal involves deploying highly electrically charged tethers in orbit. The idea is that the electrons would be deflected by the large electrostatic fields and intersect the atmosphere and harmlessly dissipate.

Some scientists, however, theorize that the Van Allen belts carry some additional protection against solar wind, which means that a weakening of the belts could harm electronics and organisms, and that they may influence the Earth's telluric current, dissipating the belts could influence the behaviour of Earth's magnetic poles.

Answer 5

Good question. The spacecraft provides only a small amount of shielding. Astronauts going to the moon risked their lives just by going that far. In August 1972 between Apollos 16 and 17 there was a solar storm that would have given a crew a lethal dose in 10 hours if the timing had been different.

Answer 6

According to some conspiracy theorists, this is one of the reasons why we never went to the Moon. In order to survive the harmfull effects of radiation, they say that a craft would have to have have walls 4' thick in order to protect the crew. They also point out that if space suits did everything that NASA claimed, they should have just worn those in Chenoble and everything would have been fine.

Answer 7

The craft they travel in is protected.

Man can tolerate a certain amount of this radiation but not much.

Answer 8

I agree with Polly Pox!