Review of the 2004 NASA Space Radiation Summer School

During the summer of 2004, the first NASA Space Radiation Summer School was organized at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Medical Department and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory. Eleven students from different backgrounds were selected to participate in an extensive series of lectures, training sessions and laboratory activities sponsored by the NASA Radiation Health Program in collaboration with BNL and Loma Linda University. A total of twenty lecturers provided a very extensive series of talks covering basic and state of the art concepts in space radiation environment, physics and radiobiology. Laboratory and accelerator activities were coordinated and led by eight instructors and three advisors. A total of 12 hours of beam time were used to exposed materials, detectors, cells and animals to 1 GeV/n iron ions at NSRL. Comparative studies using gamma rays employed around 6 hours of the CERF usage.

The summer school lasted 3 weeks, from June 1 to June 18, 2004. The course was organized around eleven lecture series, several low- and high-LET laboratory activities, NSRL and CERF runs, planning and protocol discussion sessions and data collection and analysis series. The first week contained a set of lectures dealing mostly with basic concepts in physics, dosimetry, radiobiology, space radiation problems and accelerator operations. Concurrent sessions were dedicated to complete specific BNL training and plan and prepare experiments for low- and high-LET radiation exposures. The second week contained lectures on high-LET radiobiology as well as extensive laboratory protocols. In addition, students were trained in NSRL operations and they were able to run control experiments using gamma rays in preparation for NSRL runs. Finally, on the third week, students run experiments at NSRL using 1 GeV/n iron ions obtaining data from different endpoints that were discussed and analyzed with the instructors. In addition, several homework assignments were used to test the student’s level of comprehension of the lectures and laboratory activities. The write up of a full BNL beam time request proposal was required by each student.

In conclusion, the students went through a very complicated series of experiments in a very short-period of time and with some substantial planning problems and logistic support. The actual experience demonstrated an early prediction of complexity of the course due to too many experiments crammed in a very tight schedule and with not enough time for planning and preparation by faculty and technical support before the course begun. It is highly recommended that for the next course it will be critical to prepare a simpler set of experiments using cells to demonstrate basic concepts, as well as methods with a strong link with lectures series. Animal experiments must be reduced and focused in simpler experiments to demonstrate handling procedures and irradiation methods rather of obtaining some data for biological interpretation.

• Students in the 2004 NSRSS
• Photos

Last Modified: March 17, 2008
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One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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