Of all the hazards facing a human mission to Mars — something NASA and countless other space buffs would love to see at some point — one of the hardest to solve is the radiation that saturates interplanetary space.
New data, gathered by NASA's Curiosity rover as it traveled to Mars, have confirmed that interplanetary space is a hostile medium, and suggest that engineers need to find a way to speed up space travel significantly if they hope to reduce radiation exposure.
The new research, which was published online Thursday by the journal Science, is not a game-changer for human spaceflight. But it brings more hard data to a known risk factor, and will help NASA and other space agencies to come up with strategies for making spaceflight safer.