According to the British science weekly, astronauts on route to Mars might be at risk unless their craft is made of the right materials.

Solar flares send high-energy protons streaming through the solar system, and the radiation can be intense enough to be a threat to the health of astronauts. And compared to the Apollo missions to the moon that took only a few day, the many months it will take to get to Mars makes the issue critical to ensuring crew safety.

And just this past January, the current space station crew had to take shelter in the bulkier Russian side of the station during a powerful series of flares.

Scientists have only been able to directly measure the radiation from solar eruptions for the past four decades. To this end, Lawrence Townsend of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and his colleagues have calculated the radiation effects of the most powerful solar flare ever recorded, based on evidence that the flare left behind in Greenland's ice nearly 150 years ago.

By chance this flare was seen by a British astronomer in September 1859, and the radiation from this flare created nitrates and beryllium-10 in Earth's upper atmosphere.

These ended up frozen into Greenland ice. The amount of nitrates found in ice cores collected from Greenland suggests that Earth was hit by about 20 billion high-energy protons per square centimeter, more than in any other event of the past 500 years.

And the beryllium reveals that the energy spectrum of these protons was roughly equivalent to that of a flare recorded in August 1972.

According to New Scientist, Townsend's team have now used this information to calculate the radiation levels astronauts would be exposed to from super flares as determined by different grades of shielding.

They found that astronauts behind only a few centimeters of aluminum - the shielding you'd find in the average spacecraft- would suffer a dose that could cause acute radiation sickness and possibly even death.

"Aluminum is not a good radiation shield," says Townsend. "We are looking at alternative materials, such as polyethylene and carbon foams impregnated with hydrogen. A worst-case event would probably be survivable if you use some other material than aluminum."

This report is based on an article that will appear in the March 19 issue of New Scientist.

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