Scott Solomon

And so that magnetic field actually traps a lot of the space radiation and prevents it from getting closer to the Earth.

So astronauts on the International Space Station aren't exposed to as much radiation

as astronauts on the moon, on Mars, or traveling anywhere beyond the limits of that magnetic field, the magnetosphere.

Those are called the Van Allen radiation belts.

And interesting story how they were discovered.

I talk about that in my book.

But, you know, yeah, we know that that radiation affects the body, right?

I mean, the thing that you typically think about is cancer, right?

And the cancer risk for anybody traveling in space is certainly higher.

It's one of the reasons that NASA limits the amount of time that astronauts are

are able to go to space.

Astronauts essentially will kind of time out at a certain point if they have reached a radiation exposure that NASA deems to be too risky.

And so that's a known risk, but we also know that there's things other than cancer that radiation does, right?

uh radiation can have cognitive effects there's some really interesting research

that looks at simulated space radiation and tries to understand like what does this do to our nervous system, right?

And research on rodents, for example, shows that if they're exposed to simulated space radiation, they actually have slower responses to tasks that they've been taught how to do.

That's pretty concerning for anybody planning on going deeper into space.

Yeah, I mean, there's a thing that people call, astronauts call space fog or space brain sometimes.

Space face and space brain.

There you go.