Scientists may finally have answer to problem that would have killed anyone standing on Moon in 1972

In August 1972, in the gap between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, the Sun let loose a burst of particles severe enough that Nasa later described it as a near-miss. Nobody was out there to catch it. Had a crew been on the lunar surface or in transit, the dose would have been fatal. That single event has hung over every deep-space mission plan since.A research team from Italy and Germany now says it has a partial fix, and it does not run on cryogenics or reactor-grade power. It runs on permanent magnets. The team packed 1,482 neodymium-iron-boron magnets, each about 1.6 square inches, into an 11-square-foot array weighing 661 pounds. In testing, the array deflected roughly 20% of solar particles in the 0.1 to 10 megaelectronvolt range. High-energy particles still punched through, so this is not a force field.