Cosmic Rays and the Heliopause
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- Visualizations by:
- Walt Feimer
- View full credits
This animation shows how variations in the size of the heliosphere affect how many cosmic rays reach Earth. As the heliosphere expands, it blocks more cosmic rays, and as it contracts, more cosmic rays get through and can affect astronauts and satellites.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Conceptual Image Lab
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Animator
- Walt Feimer (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Related Pages
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ID: 13275 Produced Video
![Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available.Music credits: “Boreal Moment” by Benoit Scarwell [SACEM]; “Sensory Questioning”, “Natural Time Cycles”, “Emerging Designer”, and “Experimental Design” by Laurent Dury [SACEM]; “Superluminal” by Lee Groves [PRS], Peter George Marett [PRS] from Killer Tracks](/vis/a010000/a013200/a013275/13275_AstronautRadiation_Twitter.01205_print.jpg)
How NASA Will Protect Astronauts From Space Radiation
Read moreAugust 1972, as NASA scientist Ian Richardson remembers it, was hot. In Surrey, England, where he grew up, the fields were brown and dry, and people tried to stay out of the Sun, indoors and televisions on. But for several days that month, his TV picture kept breaking up. “Do not adjust your set,” he recalls the BBC announcing. “Heat isn’t causing the interference. It’s sunspots.”The same sunspots that disrupted the television signals led to enormous solar flares — powerful bursts of radiation from the Sun — Aug. 4-7 that year. Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the solar eruptions were a near miss for lunar explorers. Had they been in orbit or on the Moon’s surface, they would have sustained dangerous levels of solar radiation sparked by the eruptions. Today, the Apollo-era flares serve as a reminder of the threat of radiation exposure for technology and astronauts in space. Understanding and predicting solar eruptions is crucial for safe space exploration. Almost 50 years since those 1972 storms, the data, technology and resources available to NASA have improved, enabling advancements towards space weather forecasts and astronaut protection — key to NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon.Read more on NASA.gov. ||
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