Air Travel, Cosmic Rays, and Damaged Sensors

I have done a great deal of air travel in the last decade and often carrying one or more DSLR's so I was interested to learn that Cosmic Rays, which are more prevalent the higher up you go, can permanently damage a cameras sensor.  I realized that Cosmic Rays might flip a bit or cause a pixel to read wrong but was not aware it could actually cause permanent damage to the sensor.  What are we supposed to do to limit/stop this from happening?  CR's are very energetic and even a layer or lead isn't going to completely eliminate them so what's the best method for transport in an airliner?  I understand that some pros ground ship there gear -- sounds impractical to me.


Brian

You aren't going to like this answer but my feeling is that out of all of the things to worry about with camera gear and flying, that is absolutely the last thing I worry about and that includes my 101 megapixel digital back that costs more than 95% of new cars.

E.J. Peiker wrote:You aren't going to like this answer but my feeling is that out of all of the things to worry about with camera gear and flying, that is absolutely the last thing I worry about and that includes my 101 megapixel digital back that costs more than 95% of new cars.

No, not all that worked up about it, but since the realization that this happens is fairly recent I figured I'd ask.  The bigger problem, of course, is cameras in space with no atmosphere to blunt most of the CR's -- the DSLR's aboard the ISS apparently last less than a year.  Again, I'd thought about it before but just assumed it would flip a bit or cause a pixel to be off for that one shot and would be OK the next shot.  I wonder what percentage of CR strikes on PC's result in permanent damage to a memory location or transistor.  I'd guess transistors would be OK after reboot so the CPU should be OK but flash memory might not fair so well.  As features sizes continue to shrink I'd suspect the probability of lockup or permanent damage would be higher.  

It would be interesting to know what research is being done for this problem as it's real expensive to send a mission to repair/replace things at the orbit of, say, Hubble.  In addition, newer missions like the James Webb will not be repairable or replaceable given the location it will be stationed.

Of course the bigger concern would be the flight control computers going AFU at a critical point in the mission.  I know they have backups/redundancy and that's probably one of the main reasons to have redundancy.  Space is not very friendly is it.


Brian