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Radiation is a primary concern for long-duration human spaceflight, such as the planned trips to Mars, which are the stated goal of organizations such as NASA and SpaceX. Shielding is the standard way to protect astronauts from radiation during those flights. However, shielding is heavy and, therefore, expensive when it is launched off the Earth. What if, instead, astronauts could hitch a ride on a giant mass of shielding already in space that will take them directly to their destination? That is the basic thought behind a paper from Victor Reshetnyk and his student at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n They looked at data collected by NASA\u2019s Horizons service and analyzed the orbits of over 35,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) for their trajectories to see if their paths would cross somewhere between the binary pairs of Earth-Venus, Earth-Mars, or Mars-Venus. If so, then in theory, they could be used as shielding from the deadly radiation astronauts would have to either suffer from or shield against on the trip.<\/p>\n Given the sheer amount of objects they looked at, they were bound to find some good candidates \u2013 and they did, with an estimated 525 making \u201cfast\u201d transfers of less than 180 days. They then further narrowed this list down to a reasonable speed during the approach to the planet they would start from \u2013 essentially to make sure that a crewed spacecraft could actually catch up to the asteroid without burning an absurd amount of fuel.<\/p>\n \n