Space rays keeping us from Mars

Cosmic rays are so dangerous and so poorly understood that people are unlikely to get to Mars or even back to the moon until better ways are found to protect astronauts, experts said yesterday.

And NASA is not properly funding the right experiments to find out how, the National Research Council committee said.

The committee of experts agreed that NASA'S existing radiation safety standards can protect astronauts and they urged the US space agency to keep them in place.