Late last month, NASA announced the winners of 12 awards for studying the biological effects of radiation. Topping the list is a $1.75 million project to irradiate up to 28 squirrel monkeys in an effort to find out what space radiation does to the central nervous system.

Monkeys are back at NASA (Image: NASA)

If it goes ahead, the experiment will be the first NASA-funded primate project to begin in more than 30 years. What will the experiment do and what does NASA hope to learn? New Scientist investigates.

What will this new experiment entail?

A group at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, will expose the monkeys to a single dose of radiation that will be equivalent to the total amount of radiation astronauts will absorb during a three-year-long Mars mission. The monkeys' performance before and after exposure will be tested by measuring how they respond to visual cues on a computer touch screen.

The experiment is designed to investigate the effects of solar flares and galactic cosmic rays: both will bombard astronauts with charged particles in greater numbers once they leave the protection of Earth's magnetosphere.

Why does NASA want to do this experiment?

More of the story,
click image