Mars Mission's Invisible Enemy: Radiation

New goals for NASA are being determined, however the current barrier to further mars exploration entails radiation. A couple reasons for not wanting to start a new project scientists say, for one is Radiation, in the form of heavy ions from distant stars, zips through everything in their path. Others include price, estimated at $30 billion to $60 billion, and launching enough food, supplies and fuel for a round trip. Any one of these could make the project impractical. In a new $34 million NASA laboratory here, part of Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are using subatomic particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light to slam into materials that could be used in a spaceship, and tissue samples and small animals. Using tools like PET and M.R.I. scans and DNA sequencing, they hope to shed light on ways that radiation damages biological tissue, and what can be done about it. On a trip to Mars and back, probably every cell in the body would be hit by an ionized particle or a proton, researchers say, and they have very little idea what that would do. ''If every neuron in your brain gets hit, do you come back being a blithering idiot, or not?'' asked Dr. Derek I. Lowenstein, the chairman of Brookhaven's collider accelerator department.