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Ten-year-old Pat Duggin had a backyard seat for what he describes as free fireworks from Cape Canaveral. The son of an Air Force chief master sergeant, he has vivid memories of seeing the night sky burst into light with the Pioneer 10 probe heading toward Jupiter aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket in 1972.
Planning for a crew’s health in deep space is as essential as for a successful rocket launch, experts say. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of Central Florida have active roles in that work to ensure astronauts’ physical and mental health for the 140-million-mile trek from Earth to Mars. Radiation, isolation, distance, gravity fields and closed environments are the high-risk factors of all space exploration that scientists take into account while planning for the great crewed journeys.
