As NASA prepares for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars, understanding what might happen to humans exposed to solar radiation outside Earth's magnetic field is critical. During the May storm, BioSentinel, a small spacecraft, gathered valuable data to help answer this question.

"We wanted to take advantage of the unique stage of the solar cycle we're in - the solar maximum, when the Sun is at its most active - so that we can continue to monitor the space radiation environment," said Sergio Santa Maria, principal investigator for BioSentinel's spaceflight mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "These data are relevant not just to the heliophysics community but also to understand the radiation environment for future crewed missions into deep space."

BioSentinel, a satellite roughly the size of a cereal box, is currently over 30 million miles away from Earth, orbiting the Sun. During the May coronal mass ejection, it endured the storm without the protection of a planetary magnetic field. Initial data suggest that while this geomagnetic storm was significant, it was classified as a moderate solar radiation storm.

This means there was no substantial increase in hazardous solar particles, posing no serious threat to life, even to unprotected spacecraft like BioSentinel. These findings help scientists map the path of solar radiation storms through space and their potential risks to life beyond Earth.

Originally, BioSentinel was designed to study yeast samples in deep space. Though those samples are no longer viable, BioSentinel has continued to adapt, offering new opportunities to study how deep space conditions might affect life beyond Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetosphere. Its biosensor instruments gather valuable radiation data. More than a year and a half after its November 2022 launch, BioSentinel continues to move farther from Earth, providing increasingly important information for scientists.

"Even though the biological part of the BioSentinel mission was completed a few months after launch, we believe that there is significant scientific value in continuing with the mission," said Santa Maria.

"The fact that the CubeSat continues to operate and that we can communicate with it, highlights the potential use of the spacecraft and many of its subsystems and components for future long-term missions beyond low Earth orbit."

While auroras dazzle observers on Earth, they also remind us of the unseen cosmic forces at play. As NASA and its partners explore space environments, missions like BioSentinel are vital to understanding the risks of living beyond Earth's protective sphere.

Related Links
BioSentinel
Solar Science News at SpaceDaily