Scott Solomon

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, it's sort of like you're just kind of a little bit, a little out of it, a little slower to respond to tasks that you would otherwise be able to do quickly.

And, you know, they can adjust.

But if that is something that gets worse with more radiation exposure, that's important for us to know if we're going to spend more time in deep space.

We don't know

So, you know, partly it's because the amount of radiation that those astronauts have been exposed to, as I said, isn't as great.

It's actually a different type of radiation even then.

So there's what's called these galactic cosmic rays that are out in space.

This is, you know, radiation zipping around from other galaxies, and it's largely trapped by our magnetic field.

So once you get out to the moon, to Mars, you know, any place that we might want to travel that goes, you know, beyond low Earth orbit,

We're talking about a lot more radiation exposure.

We just simply don't know what that will do to people, or especially if they're being exposed to it for a much longer period of time.

So, you know, it starts with basically trying to figure out like, you know, where is radiation coming from?

We can detect on the surface of the earth that there's, you know, some radiation.

And the initial experiments were actually done by putting radiation detectors on hot air balloons and allowing those balloons to go higher and higher.

And the surprising thing was that the radiation exposure increased

as they got higher and higher in the atmosphere.

So at first people thought like the radiation's probably coming from Earth, maybe from the center of the Earth.

No, it's coming from somewhere up high.

And, you know, even maybe it's the sun, right?