Astronauts traveling to Mars as part of the ambitious 501-day trip of Inspiration Mars will be using their own feces to protect themselves from harmful cosmic rays. When the spacecraft launches on January 5th, 2018, its walls will be stocked with packets of food and water. As the trip progresses, astronauts will replace these bags with containers of their own dehydrated feces to protect against radiation. “It’s a little queasy sounding, but there’s no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding,” Inspiration Mars’ Taber MacCallum told New Scientist.
image via NASA
via The Verge
