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Guidelines for radiation-safe human activities on the Moon

Nature Astronomy volume 8, pages 991–999 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The effects of harmful space radiation are one of the biggest concerns for future lunar explorers. Here, we use a data-validated model, the Radiation Environment and Dose on the Moon (REDMoon), to create mission schedules for different scenarios of lunar bases limited by radiation constraints. We consider habitats at the surface and subsurface of the Moon with different regolith and aluminium shielding using the last two solar cycles (2000–2022) as a baseline. The exposure due to background galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) is about 66% on the lunar surface than in interplanetary space and can even slightly increase beneath the surface before it decreases to a negligible value at about 3 m depth. If the shielding is insufficient, the surface dose during a single solar particle event could sometimes exceed annual GCR exposure, leading to an immediate replacement of the crew. Our work provides radiation-mitigation considerations for future human lunar bases and exploration cost estimates.

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Fig. 1: Dependence of the effective dose rate on the lunar soil depth for spacesuits and bases with different Al shielding thicknesses.
Fig. 2: Radiation restrictions for lunar missions.
Fig. 3: Radiation-safe environments.
Fig. 4: Measured and predicted dose rates.
Fig. 5: Total dose rate and its uncertainty.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during this study are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7504128 (ref. 23).

Code availability

For this work, we used the open-source Geant4 code available at https://geant4.org.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Key Research Program and Strategic Priority Programme of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. ZDBS-SSW-TLC00103 and XDB41000000) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42074222, 42188101 and 42130204). This work used computational and storage services associated with the Hoffman2 Shared Cluster provided by the Institute for Digital Research and Education’s Research Technology Group at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Deep Space Sciences, Deep Space Science Laboratory, Hefei, China

    Mikhail Dobynde & Jingnan Guo

  2. School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Mikhail Dobynde & Jingnan Guo

  3. Collaborative Innovation Center of Astronautical Science and Technology, Harbin, China

    Jingnan Guo

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  1. Mikhail Dobynde
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  2. Jingnan Guo
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Contributions

M.D. developed the REDMoon model, performed all the calculations, made all the illustrations, wrote the text and communicated with the reviewers. J.G. conceived the idea for the project, secured the funding, contributed equally to the text and replies to reviewers, discussed the results and how to present the results.

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Correspondence to Mikhail Dobynde or Jingnan Guo.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Steve Blattnig, Masayuki Naito, Lim Sungwoo and Kathryn Whitman for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Dobynde, M., Guo, J. Guidelines for radiation-safe human activities on the Moon. Nat Astron 8, 991–999 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02287-8

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