How did the apollo manned missions get passed the Van Allen radiation belts?

Question

Wouldn't they have needed more protection then the two sheets of aluminum foil?

Answer 1

Apparently Some astro-nots like Bean (apollo 12) didn't realize he went through The Van allen blets, (perhaps nasa "forgot" to inform the crew about radiation.  (chuckle)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ65d30kY...

in any case Radiation is still very much a problem today and a real moon landing is still far off.

The space shuttle flies 365 miles above the earth and they saw shooting stars with their eyes closed, imagine 250,000 miles out.

studies showed that the astro-nots would have experienced  over 11000 rem/hour radiation exposure in the belts.

It never happened.

Answer 2

Some people seem to think that "radiation" is one of those words that carries instant death. You have radiation in your own kitchen, and you receive plenty of it every time you stand in the sun.

The spacecraft passed through the VAB in a short time. They received as much radiation as they would have got in an afternoon at the beach.

Answer 3

There's a reason astronauts back then were considered heroes.  They risked death to do stuff that nobody ever did before.  Like almost everyone else said, they went through quickly and DID get exposed to radiation.  

By the way, YOU are radioactive.  Look up how carbon dating works if you don't believe me.

Answer 4

Simply said, the radiation there isn't as instantly deadly as the One-Bit-brained Moonhoaxpropenents claim, and the Astronauts moved through them quick enough to avoid any danger.

Answer 5

They had more protection than 'two sheets of aluminium foil'. For one thing that was a description of the thickness of the pressure skin of the lunar module, and the astronauts weren't in the lunar module when they passed through the belts. For another, if you check the construction of any of the Apollo spacecraft, there was more than that thin metal sheet between the astronauts and the outside of the spacecraft. There were inner skins, outer protective layers, several layers of mylar or honeycomb, interior control panels and stowage spaces, fuel tanks, all sorts.

A third point is that the radiation in the belts is particle radiation, and the best shield for it happens to be light metals like aluminium, or plastics, both of which were in abundant supply in the construction of the spacecraft.

And finally, they didnt linger there but went through at full pelt, taking about two hours in total to pass through.

Answer 6

One of the arguments that people who think the moon landings were hoaxed is that the astronauts couldn't survive the radiation from the van Allen Belts, or solar flares, or coronal mass ejections.

The simple answer is that the astronauts passed through the van Allen Belts in about one half hour. The total exposure was equal to one X-ray.

Even Dr. James van Allen stated that the levels of radiation weren't enough to hurt the astronauts when on the way to the moon.

Answer 7

Well the radiation belts really arn't that strong. It would be like getting like a few X-rays at the doctors. there was not that much danger. Don't listen to Dr.MoonFaker he does not know what he is talking about. Plus I am sure he is not even a doctor.

Answer 8

Quickly.

They passed the radiation belts in less than 20 minutes after trans-lunar injection, and they passed through regions which are not so active, compared to the core regions of the belts.

The primary radiation in the Van Allen Belts is proton radiation, that are hydrogen atoms cores without electrons. Because they are charged, Earths magnetic field can concentrate them in the belts. But because they are charged, they are also deflected already by small shields.

The thermal shielding around the pressure hull of Apollo was already keeping all, but the rare high-energy protons away, at no additional costs. Of course, there is still radiation left, which was measured - all astronauts wore personal dosimeters which measured their exposure to radiation.

I attached the averaged measured radiation levels of the Apollo flights as source. 100 rad are one Gray, assuming all is proton radiation (which it wasn't), the Apollo 14 exposure for example would be equal to 57 mSv (millisievert) .

That is about the allowed annual dose of a radiation worker.

For causing a mild radiation sickness in a short term exposure, the levels would need to be 10-20 times higher as the peak value of Apollo 14.

The deadly dose (LD50) is 4500-5000 mSv.

So, there was a high radiation during the mission, with one mission reaching the annual safe radiation limit of 50 mSv. Still, their cancer risk was not even increased by 1% that way... (0.8% more risk statistically require 100 mSv).

The doses of the Apollo crews are even lower as what aircraft crews on transatlantic flights accumulate during the year.

EDIT: And don't trust the Dr Moonfaker numbers - 10000 rem or roughly 100000 mSv would be enough to toast even unmanned spacecraft.

Which obviously have no such problems.

Answer 9

Ok first of all, do not listed to "Dr.MoonFaker" because it is obvious his scientific knowledge came from YouTube.

First of all, NASA was worried about the Van Allen radiation belts being a problem in a way. They weren't afraid of the astronautes (not "astro-nots") dying, but they were afraid that they would loose comunication for a period of time. Although some signals were scrambled, and there was a minor black out period, everything turned out fine.

This is an exerpt of information from http://www.clavius.org/envrad.html.

-It doesn't matter how difficult or expensive it might have been to falsify the lunar landings. Since it was absolutely impossible to solve the radiation problem, the landings had to have been faked.

This is a common method of argument that attempts to prove something that can't be proven, by disproving something else. In this case the reader is compelled to accept the conspiracy theory and all its attendant problems and improbabilities, simply on the basis that no matter how difficult, absurd, or far-fetched a particular proposition may be, if it's the only alternative to something clearly impossible then it must -- somehow -- have come to pass. This false dilemma is aimed at pushing the reader past healthy skepticism and into a frame of mind where the absurd seems plausible.

The false dilemma is only convincing if the supposedly impossible alternative is made to seem truly impossible. And so conspiracists argue very strenuously that the radiation from various sources spelled absolute doom for the Apollo missions. They quote frightening statistics and cite various highly technical sources to try to establish to the reader that the radiation poses a deadly threat.

But in fact most conspiracists know only slightly more about radiation than the average reader. This means only a very few people in the world can dispute their allegations, and the conspiracists can simply dismiss them as part of the conspiracy.

-The Van Allen belts are full of deadly radiation, and anyone passing through them would be fried.

Needless to say this is a very simplistic statement. Yes, there is deadly radiation in the Van Allen belts, but the nature of that radiation was known to the Apollo engineers and they were able to make suitable preparations. The principle danger of the Van Allen belts is high-energy protons, which are not that difficult to shield against. And the Apollo navigators plotted a course through the thinnest parts of the belts and arranged for the spacecraft to pass through them quickly, limiting the exposure.

The Van Allen belts span only about forty degrees of earth's latitude -- twenty degrees above and below the magnetic equator. The diagrams of Apollo's translunar trajectory printed in various press releases are not entirely accurate. They tend to show only a two-dimensional version of the actual trajectory. The actual trajectory was three-dimensional. The highly technical reports of Apollo, accessible to but not generally understood by the public, give the three-dimensional details of the translunar trajectory.

Each mission flew a slightly different trajectory in order to access its landing site, but the orbital inclination of the translunar coast trajectory was always in the neighborhood of 30°. Stated another way, the geometric plane containing the translunar trajectory was inclined to the earth's equator by about 30°. A spacecraft following that trajectory would bypass all but the edges of the Van Allen belts.

This is not to dispute that passage through the Van Allen belts would be dangerous. But NASA conducted a series of experiments designed to investigate the nature of the Van Allen belts, culminating in the repeated traversal of the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly (an intense, low-hanging patch of Van Allen belt) by the Gemini 10 astronauts.

"The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense." -- Dr. James Van Allen