Speaker
Description
In view of manned missions targeted to the Moon and Mars, for which radiation exposure is one of the greatest challenges, it is of fundamental importance to have tools, which allows the determination of the particle flux and spectra at any time during the mission from transit trajectory to planetary surface operations.
The environment at the surface is, apart from occasional solar energetic particle events, dominated by galactic cosmic radiation, secondary particles produced in their interaction with the atmosphere and albedo particles from the regolith. The highly energetic primary cosmic radiation consists mainly of fully ionized nuclei creating a complex radiation field at the surface. This complex field, its formation and its potential health risk posed to astronauts on future manned missions can only be fully understood using a combination of measurements and model calculations. We will present our ongoing effort in modeling RAD detector response as part of the effort of understanding this complex environment.
Another important aspect of the problem, modeling how vehicle shielding mitigates the dose accumulated by astronauts. This is an essential step toward reducing these risk. In order to do that it is necessary to handle complex object geometries. Standard Monte Carlo programs use mainly simple geometrical forms such as parallelepipeds, ellipsoids, or planes to construct more complex geometries. Vehicle/habitat analysis can be substantially improved by implementing better methods of directly infusing CAD architecture into Monte-Carlo transport codes. In this context, we will present results obtained with the DAGMC package
