NASA’s BioSentinel satellite is studying the impacts of solar radiation in deep space, providing crucial insights for future crewed missions beyond Earth’s protective embrace. This blog explores the mission’s objectives, its response to a recent geomagnetic storm, and the significance of its findings for the future of space exploration.
Monitoring the Sun’s Wrath
In May 2024, a massive geomagnetic storm struck the Earth, igniting brilliant auroras in skies around the globe. This was a once-in-a-lifetime light display due to what is known as CME, or coronal mass ejection which is a large release of plasma and magnetic field from the sun.
While these auroras were beautiful for observers on Earth, they also served as a prompt: what would happen to people outside Earth’s magnetic field? Given that NASA wants also to take astronauts back to the Moon, culminating in a Mars mission at some remote point in the future, this is an critical question.
On-site to answer just that question was NASA’s BioSentinel satellite, which measured radiation exposure first-hand in the deep space environment. Lacking any such protection, BioSentinel endured the storm while orbiting the sun millions of miles distant on 8 May, offering researchers a novel opportunity to explore how little organisms cope with extraterrestrial conditions.
Uncovering the Secrets of Solar Radiation
Scientists have found the data gathered by BioSentinel during the geomagnetic storm in May 2024 to be highly informative. As a preliminary result, we have already found that the solar particles would have only been moderately more hazardous on the Earth during this kind of extreme storm – not significantly life-threatening.
This kind of knowledge is essential to understanding how solar radiation storms propagate with distance in space and which parts are most severe. Air Force personnel evaluated the radiation environment experienced by BioSentinel which can help predict what future crewed missions might experience should they travel beyond the protective magnetic field of Earth.
BioSentinel is working against its original mission to probe samples of yeast in deep space, which the satellite can no longer accommodate now that biological experiments are complete, but has now evolved to follow a new path in pursuit of knowledge. The Platinum-TEL biosensor instrument is still building upon its data of deep-space radiation levels, an invaluable resource to the scientific community as humanity attempts to grapple with the dangers and potential hurdles of moving beyond our planet’s atmosphere into deeper stages of space.
Conclusion
The BioSentinel satellite: an important step forward in understanding deep space radiation, a key prerequisite for safe travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond Weathering such extreme solar storms, garnering invaluable information, BioSentinel will be supplying scientists with vital data to help secure astronauts and the continued viability of these grand missions. As we explore further out into space, platforms like BioSentinel will remain crucial in our ongoing quest to fathom — and one day overcome — the difficulties of the last frontier.
