cosmic particles

As Orion swings around the moon, the spacecraft will be flying far beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field, in a realm relatively riddled with high-energy cosmic particles that can damage cells and DNA.

If it does, other proposals could lose out, such as a continent-spanning radio array and detectors for neutrinos and other cosmic particles.

It does so by searching for neutrinos, cosmic particles so tiny that many trillions pass through each of us every second.

By not having an electrical charge, neutrinos are not affected by interstellar and intergalactic magnetic fields and other influences that scramble the paths of other types of cosmic particles, such as protons and electrons.

Masatoshi Koshiba, 94, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for studies of the ghostly cosmic particles known as neutrinos, died Nov. 16 in Edogawa Hospital in Tokyo.