Humans will not go to Mars

What about a Faraday cage? no radio signal can penetrate lead.

Originally posted by masterp
What about a Faraday cage? no radio signal can penetrate lead.

No rocket is going to haul a lead cage to Mars. I also doubt whether NASA will spend billions to create a spacecraft that amounts of fuel on par with a small city to support an EMF-shield. The best idea is to develop materials which shield the astronauts from whatever dangers may be encountered.

Originally posted by masterp
What about a Faraday cage? no radio signal can penetrate lead.

A Faraday cage wouldn't work as cosmic radiation and radio waves are different animals.

Faraday cages are also not necessarily made of lead, however lead would stop cosmic radition if it's thick enough.

The most common Faraday cage in use today? Look on the front door of your microwave oven.

Cheers

JS

Radiation is only one of a many concerns on getting to Mars intact. There's also other crew survival stuff and it gets worse if you want to land on Mars. I'll just talk about the radiation as the discussion seems to focus on that. The easiest way to get around the radiation is a magnetic field. The thing about the earth's magnetic field is that it is WEAK. Really weak (.3-.6 Gauss), it's useful because it's so damn big. A similar representation would be useful on the trip to Mars. I figure outriggers with field generators can be placed on the craft so that the magnetic fields don't screw with sensitive electronics. This should help, radiation shielding is required regardless because that alone won't do it and redundancy on long space flight is good. Radiation is one of many concerns on long spaceflight.