X-rays and gamma rays that Eros gives off in response to bombardment by solar and cosmic radiation.
Since cosmic radiation alters surface composition, Curiosity can drill into rock to extract pristine material from below.
Along the way the astronauts would be bombarded by cosmic radiation and risk being baked by unpredictable solar flares.
Graduate students shuttled equipment across the country by car to avoid shipping them by airplanes, which would put the experiment closer to cosmic radiation.
With light and power sorted, the next challenge would be protecting green houses from cosmic radiation, micro-meteorites and other dangers presented by the absence of an atmosphere.
Another possibility would be to figure out how to generate a magnetic field around the spacecraft that mimics the one that protects Earth from the worst cosmic radiation.
To address these outstanding questions, the team will collect samples of rock to date their exposure to cosmic radiation and analyse how glaciers and ice have retreated since the last ice age, around 20, 000 years ago.
This new photogenic moment, released Thursday, comes courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which detects cosmic microwave background radiation -- the light left over from the Big Bang.
In 1966 Kenneth Greisen, Vadim Kuzmin and Georgiy Zatsepin showed that high-energy charged particles (cosmic rays are mostly atomic nuclei, and thus positively charged) should be slowed by collisions with the photons of the cosmic microwave background (radiation left over from the Big Bang that permeates all space).
Astronauts, too, are at risk from the higher doses of radiation associated with cosmic rays.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was designed to search for dark matter by collecting high energy radiation known as cosmic rays, and then sort through it looking for a certain class of particle believed to be created after two bits of dark matter collide in space and destroy each other.
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They have produced highly accurate maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, which has its origins in the very early stages of the Universe.
Current experiments, which were launched in September, include looking for microbes in the upper atmosphere, detecting cosmic rays, and looking for Cherenkov radiation.
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"Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere, " explained Prof Bill Webber from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
The Sun's magnetic field and solar wind - mainly in the form of electrons and protons coming out of the Sun - protects the entire Solar System by acting as a sort of shield from cosmic rays (very energetic particles and radiation from outer space).
As plans for deep space exploration ramp up, radiation is a big concern from high-energy galactic cosmic rays spewed by distant supernova explosions to sporadic bursts of charged particles hurled by the sun.
The new map is a smart byproduct of the European Space Agency (Esa) telescope's main mission which is to survey the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB - a pervasive but faint glow of long-wavelength radiation that comes to us from the very edge of the observable Universe.
BBC: Planck telescope: A map of all the 'stuff' in the cosmos
Regardless of which theory is correct (and both might be wrong), the effect of fewer cosmic rays would be fewer clouds and since clouds tend to cool the earth by reflecting incoming solar radiation away from it a warmer planet.
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