Fans of Star Trek will be delighted to learn that reality is finally catching up with fiction.
According to the Times, for Captain Kirk and his crew, the starship Enterprise's force fields were all that stood in the way of oblivion from Klingon lasers. Now scientists are
seeking to build Star Trek-style shields for real, to protect astronauts on their way to Mars.
Cosmic rays and solar flares are one of the chief hazards faced by astronauts venturing into space, and the need to protect crews against them is one of the biggest obstacles to long missions.
Now scientists at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire are proposing a Star Trek solution: to protect the spacecraft with a magnetic field like the Earth's. A team led by Ruth Bamford will use technology originally developed for experimental nuclear fusion reactors to wrap a model spacecraft in a magnetic cocoon, so that harmful plasma bounces off.
"It's no accident that Star Trek featured this sort of technology, as it had advisers who work for Nasa and it's feasible," Dr Bamford said. "The shields seem to be some sort of invisible barrier, which energy bounces off, and that sort of deflector shield is exactly what we're talking about."
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