Abu Dhabi professor wins Nasa award for Mars shield idea

Dr George Hitt, an assistant professor at Khalifa University, has devised a shield that would help protect any human travellers to the Red Planet from the high-energy radiation in space.

Dr George Hitt, an assistant professor at Khalifa University, won a Nasa award for his idea on shielding astronauts. Lee Hoagland / The National

LONDON // An Abu Dhabi academic has won a Nasa contest for his ideas on protecting astronauts from high-energy radiation on the long haul to Mars.

Dr George Hitt, an assistant professor at Khalifa University, proposed a reusable shield with which a spacecraft would link up after leaving the Earth’s orbit.

It would be uncoupled before entering Mars’s atmosphere then picked up for the trip back.

Dr Hitt said he was surprised to win the US$5,000 (Dh18,365) first prize for the contest, which he saw advertised in Scientific American magazine.

“I’ve never really received recognition on this level for work that I’ve done in the past,” he said.

At their closest, Mars and Earth are separated by tens of millions of kilometres. Astronauts would be vulnerable to the high-energy radiation, or galactic cosmic rays, that can pass through spacecraft hulls and damage human cells.

Those rays come from outside the solar system and consist of protons, the positively charged particles in the nucleus of atoms.

The outer part of Dr Hitt’s shield would be made of high-density materials to absorb the rays. Inside would be less dense materials to absorb secondary radiation from when the rays hit the shield.

Despite his eagerness in developing ways of travelling to Mars, Dr Hitt is not keen to make the trip, estimated to take 500 days.

“It’s hard to get around the fact that there’s a strong possibility it would be a one-way trip.

“You would be there indefinitely as part of a settlement, or you go there and circumstances prevent you from returning. I have a family. Whoever goes to Mars has really got to think about their attachments on Earth.”

It is estimated that any shield would have to cut out about four-fifths of the galactic cosmic rays to ensure astronauts did not receive an excessive dose.

Dr Hitt, an American who has a PhD from Michigan State University, said his idea for a “passive shield” was more realistic than proposals for “active shields” using electrostatic or magnetic radiation to deflect the rays.

The latter approach, he said, would involve having to put vast structures into space similar to the large particle accelerators built on Earth.

“That gave me the edge in the competition,” Dr Hitt said. “Active shielding that would mitigate galactic cosmic rays is going to be tens or hundreds of times more massive.”

In principle, a shield of the kind proposed by Dr Hitt is “a worthwhile type of technology to develop”, said John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the UK’s University of Leicester and member of Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory, who was not involved in the competition.

“This has always been one of the major problems of exploration, the radiation that astronauts are likely to receive,” Prof Bridges said.

Nasa aims to be able to send humans to Mars in the 2030s and Prof Bridges says “it will happen”.

“It’s the next logical step in human exploration of the solar system beyond the Earth-Moon system,” he said.

Dr Hitt is now considering entering a new phase of the Nasa contest, which asks for submissions giving more detail on how ideas would work in practice.

He would need to gather a team of academics with expertise in various disciplines.