Abstract
During the upcoming decades, all important worldwide space agencies are planning to undertake interplanetary travel outside the terrestrial magnetic field. Human and robotic missions are planned from scientific exploration to economic space endeavours. The FP7-funded project eHeroes (www.eheroes.eu) plans to address one of the greatest issues in space exploration: radiation exposure to the astronauts due to space weather. The present work deals with an investigation of the radiation dose astronauts may receive during two of the most important missions, i.e. Moon and Mars colonization. Concerning the assessment, the missions are divided into many segments in order to take into consideration all the different radiation sources. The main radiation the astronauts are going to face are SPE – Solar Proton Events and GCR - Galactic Cosmic Rays, since the radiation belts around the Earth affect only a short exposure time. Extensive use of SPENVIS is made to carefully assess typical expected mission doses for the Moon and Mars, breaking up the dose into the component during flight and the component during residence on the surface. Comparison has been made with previous published studies. A key aspect of the mission planning and execution is the ability to immediately asses in real time the dose produced by a given space weather event. For this reason, eHeroes has developed a new analysis code, to be made available online on the eHeroes web site, which takes as input particle fluxes recorded by some specific satellites, such as ACE and GOES, and allows the user to choose some principal parameters related to shielding and geometric conditions. As output, the code gives the value of the effective dose and the ambient dose equivalent, both expressed in Sievert, according to recent radiation protection protocols. This eHeroes tool can be refined to take into account details of future missions and can operate in real time to help the astronauts monitor and manage their radiation exposure.