RSS RO Van Allen Belts ? maybe I'll do something ...

[DBowman]

Is there a Van Allen Belts add-on?

I know Kerbalism has a radiation belt model, but I wanted something using real world data. There is a gov site that will give all the data - solar max/min, electron/proton, energy, geomagnetic latitude and radius - so one could use that to construct an add-on that accumulated realistic radiation. 

Edited December 31, 2016 by DBowman

[Enceos]

Kerbalism is the first and only mod to implement something like that.

[Parallax59]

But this is a great idea.  When talking about crewed space flight, particularly recurring trips to the moon, it is necessary to shield or limit exposure and it would be nice to know the cumulative radiation exposure over a mission lifetime and even the lifetime of the crew (multiple mission cumulative effects should be tracked).  The same thing for missions outside the Van Allen belts where much higher natural doses of radiation occur than in low Earth orbit, not to mention the effect of solar storms. Kerbalism does consider these effects, but as you said, not with accurate real solar system data. 

[DBowman]

I might start playing around with this... I need it for my own project (Minimal Manned Mars Mission) and if it turns out to be more useful that's even better.

I thought to start prototyping using kOS. The main steps are:

1. use time to choose solar max/min data set (or interpolate)
2. find geo position (lat, lon, time)
3. convert geo position to magneto (lat, lon) - the magnetic pole is not the geo pole and wanders around (slowly)
4. now it gets complicated
5. separate data sets for protons and electrons
6. you can look up either flux at an energy or flux up to an energy - so there are probably a few 'flux buckets' you want to lookup and do things with
   1. protons not energetic enough to penetrate the craft
   2. electron energies that cannot penetrate but that generate x-rays via bremsstrahlung - hmm even the ones the get through will gen x-rays by being slowed
   3. ???
7. what to do with what's looked up?
   1. accumulate 'dosage' as the vessel moves through space time
   2. compute dosage along the orbital path before you travel it - it would be cool if you could visualise either instantaneous or accumulated dose/flux somehow - but I've no idea how to do that. Probably I can print out (dose, time) pairs, or sick time, death time etc
   3. actually kill / sicken the Kerbals no idea how to do that...
8. problems?
   1. I need to understand better
   2. modelling shielding - for my project it's pretty simple - I guess I would know more once I've looked at the details of the simple case
   3. sampling the real data set with enough resolution to be useful / getting the whole thing and their interpolators
   4. visualising the flux fields - it would be cool to have like iso flux transparent objects in space (no idea how to do) or a few planes with colour mapped intensities drawn on (easier but still no idea in practice)

[hypervelocity]

this is a great idea!!!!!