The Webcam vs. The Particle Accelerator

I was alerted to this video by Emily Lakdawalla on her Planetary Society Blog and ilbasso on Unmannedspaceflight.com. It shows the effects of a beam from a proton particle accelerator on a poor, helpless webcam. These effects are analogous to those seen in spacecraft photos due to the impact of cosmic rays and charged particles on spacecraft camera CCDs. During processing these noise hits are removed, though some, like the streaks and snow effect shown in the video, often need to be removed by hand.

An example of one I worked on was a sequence of images of Saturn's moon Epimetheus acquired last year. These images were some of the highest resolution images that will be taken of this moon during the Cassini mission. The images were acquired when Cassini was between the E and G rings, where charged particle radiation was highest and its effect on the images taken can be seen in the raw data. With the help of noise filtering, manually removing stubborn streaks and noise "blobs", and summing multiple images together to improve signal-to-noise, I managed to create a cleaned-up, final product.



Noise hits from charged particle radiation are also a problem with Io images. Io orbits within one of Jupiter's most intense radiation belts: the Io Plasma Torus. Particles from this radiation belt, composed of electrons and heavy ions like sulfur, oxygen, and sodium, can produce noise in images and affect other electrical systems on a spacecraft (like causing safing events, damaging the summation mode of a camera and the grating of a spectrometer).

New Drug Prevents Radiation Damage

nprev over at UMSF.com has pointed out a new story on the website MedHeadlines.com on the discovery of an anti-radiation drug. The drug, code-named CBLB502, prevents damage (apoptosis or cellular suicide as the article calls it) from lethal doses of radiation to bone marrow and gastrointestinal cells. This is accomplished by mimicking cancer cells by activating a chemical pathway called NFKB. Rhesus monkeys and mice given this drug an hour before radiation exposure showed no ill-effects.

Such a drug will have numerous applications. The drug will certainly be given to cancer patients receiving radiation treatment. It also has civil defense applications. Exploration of the solar system would also be helped by this drug since the ill-effects from radiation exposure in space would be reduced, perhaps making the exploration of Io more tenable.

Link: New Drug Prevents Radiation Damage [medheadlines.com]