How do we protect astronauts from space radiation? Answering this question is essential as we prepare to send humans to the Moon and on to Mars. In May 2024, a geomagnetic storm hit Earth, sending auroras across the planet’s skies. While the Earth’s magnetic field was protecting us from the solar radiation, the small spacecraft BioSentinel was collecting data to learn more about the impacts of radiation in deep space. BioSentinel is currently over 30 million miles (48 million km) from Earth, orbiting the Sun, where it weathered May’s coronal mass ejection without protection from a planetary magnetic field. Preliminary analysis of the data collected indicates that even though this was an extreme geomagnetic storm — a storm that disturbs Earth’s magnetic field — it was considered just a moderate solar radiation storm, meaning it did not produce a great increase in hazardous solar particles. Therefore, such a storm did not pose any major issue to terrestrial life forms, even if they we...