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<music throughout> Narrator: It’s tough out there for a spacecraft.

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Hardware in space must brave an ocean of dangerous radiated

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particles. These particles can slowly wear on a spacecraft over time,

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hit once and cause a temporary problem, or short the system in a

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single blow. Whether a spacecraft is headed to the Moon – like the Artemis mission

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– or facing off with the Sun – like Parker Solar Probe,

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everything onboard must be checked for reliability before launch

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Megan Casey: Every part has to be tested, and that’s where our group comes in. We take the models and we

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figure out what the radiation environment looks like, and then we test based on that environment.

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and figure out whether the part will survive or not.

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Narrator: To improve our spacecraft and protect our hardware as it travels through space,

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NASA has the Space Environment Testbed mission or SET.

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Megan Casey: This is a mission where the whole point is radiation.

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Narrator: SET helps researchers to better understand and design for the potential radiation

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effects that await spacecraft. Mike Xapsos: It’s actually doing measurements of the radiation environment

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some measurements are actually counting individual particles as they come

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in and other measurements are actually taking account of

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what the cumulative effect of all these particles are.

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Narrator: All of space is a radiation environment, but the exact conditions will vary by destination.

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The Sun fires protons.

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Earth harbors swarms of protons and electrons.

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Jupiter does the same, but in greater concentration and at higher energy.

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And everywhere you go, there are heavier ions from galactic

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cosmic rays. No spacecraft passes

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through unaffected. More knowledge from SET means more efficient

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spacecraft designs. For example, less shielding may be necessary.

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Megan Casey: Right now we assume that all missions are going to have a shielding thickness

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- by shielding thickness, we mean how thick are the walls of the spacecraft

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or the instrument - and we assume they are going to be about a tenth of an inch.

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If we can get better models and we can more tightly refine what

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the radiation environment looks like, we can maybe thin those walls out.

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Narrator: Lighter, thinner spacecraft can create savings in cost and room on board.

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Mike Xapsos: We always need to improve our design of spacecraft because

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it will help us improve our instrumentation, make

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them less expensive to design, and give us more accurate measurements.

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Narrator: We expect there to be applications to help protect

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the hardware that will bring people to the Moon and beyond.

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Megan Casey: We will be able to ensure that humans and electronics and spacecraft

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and instruments – anything we are actually sending into space – will survive in the environment

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we are putting it in. Narrator: With SET, NASA can get ready

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to go farther.

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