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.Traveling at 26,000 mph, a mission to the moon spends only minutes under theVan Allen belts.Then the astro-nots spend about an hour in the belts' regions where thehigher radiation is trapped (see The More On Space Radiation addendum).Although thehigher radiation here serious, it is miniscule compared to what is released by one big solarflare.NASA MOONED AMERICA! / ReneSunstroke / Chap.15p.127By dividing the number of flares in a month by the number of days in that month 1 foundthe average number of flares per day.Then by multiplying that average by the number ofdays in a mission I found the total average flares per mission.The chart below lists each Moon mission, and the average number of flares each day ofthat period.It also lists the total number of flares each team of astro-nots were never exposedto while not flying to the Moon.Just like you can't get a tan in a subway, you can't get dosedif you aren't in space.ASTRO-NOTS RADIATION EXPOSUREMission Dates Days in Total flares in Average per Trip Totalday flaresspace monthApollo 8 12/21 to 12/27 1968 6 640 20.64 123.8Apollo 10 05/18 to 05/26 1969 8 839 27.06 216.5Apollo 11 07/16 to 07/24 1969 8 489 15.77 126.2Apollo 12 11/14 to 11/24 1969 10 566 18.86 188.6Apollo 13 04/11 to 04/17 1970 6 688 22.93 137.6Apollo 14 01/31 to 02/09 1971 10 551 18.69 186.9Apollo 15 07/26 to 08/07 1971 12 693 22.35 268.2Apollo 16 04/16 to 04/27 1972 13 361 12.03 156.4Apollo 17 12/07 to 12/19 1972 12 210 6.77 81.2Total 85 1485.4Note: on dates that extend through two months the numbers for both months were averaged.My personal "Most Flares Avoided" award goes to the Apollo 15 team composed ofastro-nots Dave Scott, Al Worden and Jim Irwin.They won hands down.I'm tempted tobecome somewhat sarcastic about this mission.However, J i m Irwin paid a severe price inmental stability for his "fame and glory" before he died, so I will hold back on the sardoniccomments here.It seems Irwin was in touch with Bill Kaysing just before he died.I like tothink that maybe he was about to 'fess' up when he had his fatal heart attack on August 8,1991.Heart attacks, especially for middle-aged men, top the list whenever any covertagency wishes to silence someone who has become an 'enemy' of the state.The reasons maybe specious or even false, but that doesn't seem to deter them.Nor does it seem to bothercitizens who are "law and order" monomaniacs.Their numbers are now legion.Witness thepopularity of TV shows that glorify flagrant violations of our Constitution by the police, etc.As far as the all the other Apollo astro-nots are concerned, I'm sure I received moreradiation from my CRT computer screen in writing this book than they ever received fromthe 85 days they weren't in lunar space.In that same ostensible time period if you use thegrand total of 134,793 flares from the first chart, then 1485 flares burned their way acrossthe Sun.They never received a dose of radiation.Amazing!In the meantime, the special information promised by NOAA arrived in the form of abook and a user's guide to the data.The guide provides the format for data after 1975 so itwas almost useless for my purposes.It did however help to give me a small education inNASA MOONED AMERICA! / ReneSunstroke / Chap.15 p.128solar flares.The book, NOAA TECHNICAL MEMORANDUM ERL-22, was written by J.A.McKinnon, a NOAA expert on solar flares.The book's subtitle is August 1972 SolarActivity and Related Geophysical Effects , and specifically details the effects of an immenseseries of solar flares that occurred from 8/2/72 through 8/11/72.These flares, the mostspectacular series of solar flares in the twentieth century, originated without warning from aregion of the Sun known as 331.McKinnon begins his book with this statement, "In early August 1972, a series of solarflares from one region on the sun's disk made national news.The geophysical effects thatfollowed reaffirmed to laymen and scientists alike that the sun can act as a formidable sourceof radiation." 1 Wait a minute! Didn't the Russians try to tell NASA that in 1963?Mike Collins also told us that the flares were predictable in July of 1969.During theyears of the Apollo missions those long range (27-day) forecasts that NOAA provides,mostly to communication and power companies, were about as accurate as a 27-day weatherforecast by NOAA.On July 19, 1972 the long range forecast read, "27 day forecast for 20July to 16 August 1972: No significant increase in solar activity is expected." On August 2,1972 it read, "Forecast for 03-09 August 1972: Solar activity is expected to remain at a lowto moderate level." 2McKinnon, the government expert, writing some years after the Apollo 11, has this tosay about NOAA' predictions: "The activity from region 331 was not covered in any long-range forecasts." 3 The words 'not covered' mean simply in plain English that the long rangeforecasts completely failed to predict them.The short-term forecast at 2200 hours on August 1, 1972 claimed the average probabil-ity for the severe class X flare as 7 %.For a proton event it was 9 %.4 Yet less than 4 hoursand 50 minutes later solar Region 331 produced its initial major flare.It was the first in aseries that culminated in a 5 day period producing the greatest solar activity recorded in thiscentury.And that, despite the fact that the Sun was near the minimum of its cycle.Whatnow can we make of Collins' statement that NASA had a way to protect the Apollo astro-nots from solar flares when they were in space years before.Even NOAA's next day fore-casts made during the actual event were understated.Speaking of solar flares in general, McKinnon says, "A probability of 10-20% should beconsidered a low probability for class M events,." 5 In plain English he is saying that evenat the bottom of the cycle, one flare in five is large enough to emit M (medium) strength X-rays.Mckinnon continues, "Probabilities of the order of 1% are considered low with respect6to class X flares." X rated flares are the strongest [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]