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FLL 2018 'Space Exploration': Solution to space radiation

24 Nov 2018

This is rushed. This will be updated to fix possible errors.

I am part of the robotics club in school. We are in the First Lego League(FLL) competition. Each year, there is a theme for FLL. This year is 'space exploration'. We were tasked to find the challenges to space exploration, and find a solution to the problem. That's the research part, which is only one-third of the entire challenge. One of the other parts is 'Core Values', and it shows our beliefs in teamwork. The final part is though, the robot design. We get to do challenges. I will go over that in tomorrow's competition blog post. This blog post is about our research on our solution.

We decided that space radiation would be a huge barrier to space exploration. We researched the types of materials that would block out radiation. We found polyethylene would be useful to block out radiation. However, this only blocks a bit of the radiation, which is still a problem.

We concluded that materials wouldn't be enough to block out the radiation.

One solution we came up is mutating humans to withstand radiation. Although this would be highly unethical—if the entire humanity is in grave danger, would it still be unethical?

P.S.: Here is the source code for our robot!