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Artemis I crystal detectors show lunar radiation higher, not as high as feared
ScienceDaily, citing Polish nuclear physicists, says lithium fluoride detectors on NASA’s uncrewed Artemis I flight found lunar-orbit radiation higher than in Earth orbit but less dramatically so than expected.
Detectors flown on NASA’s uncrewed Artemis I mission in late 2022 measured cosmic radiation near the Moon that was higher than in low Earth orbit, but not by as large a margin as some scientists might assume, according to ScienceDaily’s account of work from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences1.
Orion carried more than 10,000 tiny crystals inside two human-shaped mannequins as part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment, or MARE1. Among them were experimental fluorescent lithium fluoride detectors from IFJ PAN in Krakow1. The team described a new analysis method in the journal Radiation Measurements1.
Prof. Pawel Bilski, a co-author, said the detectors are passive, working like photographic film: particle tracks must later be examined under a microscope1. Charged particles create color centers in the crystals; blue light then makes those regions fluoresce red so tracks can be mapped1.
Unlike plastic detectors that need chemical etching, the lithium fluoride crystals can be read with a standard fluorescence microscope1. After corrections and background-removal software, the team said results differed by no more than 15% from conventional track detectors over the overlapping energy range, and also recorded tracks below older devices’ detection threshold1.
Compared with the earlier MATROSHKA experiment on the International Space Station, Artemis I doses were distributed more evenly through the mannequins1. ISS measurements included low-energy protons trapped in Earth’s Van Allen belts, which do not extend to the Moon; lunar radiation is dominated more by high-energy galactic particles that pass through the body1.
Bilski said those trapped protons can account for most of the dose in low Earth orbit, so when that contribution vanishes near the Moon, the remaining galactic radiation still yields a higher total dose, but the gap is smaller than intuition suggests1. ScienceDaily said the compact crystals may be practical for future crew monitoring; the work was supported by Poland’s National Science Centre1.
