Applicability of particle and heavy ion transport code PHITS to the shielding design of spacecrafts

Development of HZE particle transport codes is severely required for the shielding design of spacecrafts. One-dimensional deterministic codes are generally adopted in the shielding calculation because of their reasonable computational time, but three-dimensional Monte Carlo codes are also to be employed especially in the final step of the design with fully optimized geometries. We are therefore developing a general-purpose Monte Carlo code PHITS, which can deal with the transports of all kinds of hadrons and heavy ions with energies up to 200GeV/n. For the purpose of examining the applicability of PHITS to the shielding design, neutron and charged particle spectra inside the Space Shuttle were calculated for an imaginary vessel whose shielding distribution is fitted to that of the real shuttle. Absorbed doses and dose equivalents were estimated from the spectra by applying fluence to dose conversion coefficients. The agreements between the calculated spectra or doses and the corresponding experimental data were generally satisfactory, especially for the neutron spectra, which have been barely reproduced by other studies. We therefore concluded that PHITS has a great possibility of playing an important role in the design study of spacecrafts.