Bad news wannabe Mars explorers. The round trip alone would blast you with doses of radiation that come close to the acceptable lifetime limits sets by NASA – and that's not including any practice trips to space or time spent on the Red Planet.
The results come from a detector that flew to the Red Planet along with the space agency's Curiosity rover.
Charged, energetic particles like cosmic rays can wreak havoc on delicate biological tissue. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field serve to block or deflect most of this radiation, but astronauts on trips to Mars would be exposed to much higher doses.
This biological radiation damage would be magnified exponentially in any human interstellar missions. To read more, click here.