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Originally Posted by Style
I voted no. I saw a documentary on it sometime ago. It raised the question of how humans were able to get past the radiation belt in outer space.
That and I've learned about how fucked up our government truely is.
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Fucking A, read people, read. From the site posted:
The Radiation Belts
Supposedly, travel to the moon is impossible because of the Van Allen radiation belts. So who better than Van Allen himself to describe the hazards (of course, he's part of the plot too!)
The Van Allen Belts are zones where particles from the sun are trapped by the earth's magnetic field. In a 1960 paper,
On the Radiation Hazards of Space Flight, Van Allen describes the belts and their hazards. The belts vary greatly in extent and radiation depending on solar activity, but generally there is an inner, energetic belt mostly at low latitudes between about 2000 and 4000 kilometers and an outer, less energetic belt between about 13,000 and 20,000 kilometers above the earth. The belts carry a radiation dose of about 20 roentgens (grays in modern units) per hour and the gap in between about one. These figures are for spacecraft shielded by about 4 mm of aluminum (one gram per square centimeter).
(Note: dosimetry is a complex issue and there are several types of units - roentgens, rems, rads, and SI units like grays and sieverts - that measure different things, but roentgens, rems and rads turn out to be roughly equivalent when applied to human exposure. On the other hand, if you know enough about dosimetry to care, then you should know enough to refute the Van Allen Belt argument. If you still believe the conspiracy theory, shame on you.)
Assuming, then, that we shoot the Apollo capsule straight through the belts at escape velocity (40,000 km/hour), we're talking 0.05 hours in the inner belt, 0.225 hours in the gap and 0.175 hours in the outer belt. That means a total dose of (20 x 0.05) + (.225 x 1) + (20 x 0.175) = 4.7 roentgens, or about 1% of the fatal radiation dose. Double this figure for the round trip. Once beyond the belts the radiation hazard becomes small.
Although ten roentgens is far below the lethal dose, it poses significant long-term health hazards and nowadays is considered a wholly unacceptable dosage. There are two ways to reduce the risk. First, since the inner belt is largely confined to within 30 degrees of the equator, launch into an orbit inclined at least 30 degrees to the equator and then launch into a lunar trajectory above or below the inner belt.
Second, the energy distribution of the particles in the inner and outer belt is quite different. Changing our 4 mm of aluminum to lead would have only marginal effects in reducing dosage in the inner belt, but it cuts the dosage in the outer belt
by a factor of 500. Also, the outer belt is still most intense at low latitudes and the spacecraft trajectory can be aimed to minimize radiation exposure in the outer belt.
According to NASA, none of the Apollo missions exceeded one roentgen of total dosage.