Cosmic Radiation

On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 02:35 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Al Globus wrote:
>>
>> On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 01:30 PM, victoriatangoman
> wrote:
>>
>>> The fallacy as I see it, is that your model presupposes that the
>>> Earth has has to block the radiation equivalent of what the
>>> atmosphere does. It doesn't.
>>
>> Consider just cosmic radiation. It comes from all directions.
> When we
>> are on the Earth, the Earth's mass blocks all of the radiation
> coming
>> from below us, the atmosphere attenuates the radiation coming
> from
>> above.
>
> My point is how does the cosmic radiation get to the surface of the
> Earth before the bulk of the Earth blocks it? It has to go through
> the atmosphere to get to the Earth's surface. Thus the cosmic
> radiation that comes from the arc that encompasses the sky, is also
> the level of radiation that the Earth blocks.

I must be missing something. If I'm standing on the surface of the
Earth, the cosmic radiation coming from the sky above me is not blocked
by the Earth before it hits me, only attenuated by the atmosphere above
me.

> This is much smaller
> than the level of cosmic radiation above the Earth's surface.

>
> TangoMan
>
> Canada).
>

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
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Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.