Scientists may finally have answer to problem that would have killed anyone standing on Moon in 1972

In August 1972, in the gap between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, the Sun let loose a burst of particles severe enough that Nasa later described it as a near-miss. Nobody was out there to catch it. Had a crew been on the lunar surface or in transit, the dose would have been fatal. That single event has hung over every deep-space mission plan since.A research team from Italy and Germany now says it has a partial fix, and it does not run on cryogenics or reactor-grade power. It runs on permanent magnets. The team packed 1,482 neodymium-iron-boron magnets, each about 1.6 square inches, into an 11-square-foot array weighing 661 pounds. In testing, the array deflected roughly 20% of solar particles in the 0.1 to 10 megaelectronvolt range. High-energy particles still punched through, so this is not a force field. It is a first layer.Why permanent magnet radiation shielding beats superconducting magnets on a spacecraftCosmic radiation is mostly protons moving very fast. When a charged particle crosses a magnetic field, the Lorentz force acts on it at right angles to both the field and its path, nudging it off course. Scale that up and you bend particles away from the crew module.Earlier work chased the same idea with superconducting magnets generating a 1-tesla field. Those need cryogenic cooling and power that never fails, two things spacecraft struggle to promise. Permanent magnets ask for neither. The catch is deployment. Cosmic rays arrive from every direction, so the magnets would need to wrap most of the hull, and protons striking the magnets themselves can throw off secondary radiation.Deep space radiation protection has barely moved since Apollo, and Artemis II proves itLeaving Earth means crossing the Van Allen belts, two rings of high-energy particles held in place by the planet's magnetic field. Beyond that, galactic cosmic rays and solar flares are constant. The lunar surface itself carries two to three times the radiation seen aboard the ISS.Apollo 14 astronauts absorbed about 1.14 rads across their mission, roughly double an abdominal CT scan. Survivable, and that is the trap. Those crews simply never met a major solar particle event.The current contingency is not much better. Artemis II astronauts had one option if a flare erupted mid-flight: stack cargo and supplies into a makeshift fort and wait it out. A hybrid system built around passive magnets would at least replace the cardboard fortress with something engineered.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.