Teach & Explore: SPENVIS Space Radiation Student Toolkit 2025

This toolkit aims to introduce to upper-secondary students the hazardous space environment and its potential impact on astronauts. The toolkit includes hands-on exercises using the SPENVIS tool to evaluate the equivalent dose received by astronauts during past commercial space missions. The toolkit was used in the frame of the ASGARD@spacepole activity on May 15, 2025.

In space, astronauts are exposed to the radiation doses due to the Van Allen radiation belts, galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles, all causing health hazards. Each exercise covers the estimation of the astronaut radiation exposure during a specific space mission. For the ASGARD@spacepole activity, four scenarios in low Earth orbit were considered:

1. the Inspiration4 private spaceflight mission,
2. the Axiom-1 commercial spaceflight mission,
3. the Polaris Dawn private spaceflight mission, and
4. the Fram2 private spaceflight mission.

Using the Space Environment Information System (SPENVIS) tool, the students are led to upload the mission trajectory, simulate the radiation environment, and estimate the crew radiation exposure.

For those four exercises, the mission trajectories were built based on the available Two-Line Element sets retrieved from the CelesTrak web site. In SPENVIS, the radiation environment is evaluated with the help of the AP-8 and AE-8 models for the Van Allen radiation belts, and the ESP model for the solar protons. The resulting ionizing doses are computed using SHIELDOSE-2.

Credits

• CelesTrak is a web-based service established by Dr. T.S. Kelso allowing the retrieval of unclassified Two-Line Element sets.
• SPENVIS is a web-based tool developed and operated by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy for the European Space Agency providing an integrated interface to models of the space environment and its effects.