On long voyages through deep space, astronauts will be exposed to a constant barrage of cosmic rays, the vast majority of which is made up of protons. Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have just published their results of tests they carried out on how DNA is effected by bombardment by protons.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“Scientists have been assuming that protons damage cells in a way similar to x-rays, but our results indicate that these assumptions have been wrong. The new data show that protons produce more potentially lethal double-strand breaks, a type of severe DNA damage, than other kinds of DNA damages,” said Brookhaven biologist Betsy Sutherland, the study’s lead researcher. “This means that scientists don’t really know how human DNA is affected by the most numerous particles in space and, as a result, do not know how to design the proper protection for astronauts.”

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