No. There is a popular misunderstanding of what magnetic fields do, and what they are good for. This is why, even now, you will find advertisements for 'magnetic bracelets' that are supposed to heal you or ward off bad diseases.

The last thing you want in your spacecraft is a magnetic field because it would interfere with many delicate instruments which contain metallic parts. To my knowledge, NASA has never used magnetic fields in spacecraft except in so far as they might have been indirectly generated by various experiments. There has been some modest medical interest in exploring what magnetic fields might be able to do, but nothing that has actually led to the design of a significant medical experiment involving astronauts.

Magnetic fields can be used to steer energetic particles...like the electrons in your TV picture tube. There have been some discussions about using large-scale magnetic fields on interplanetary spacecraft to help shield astronauts from cosmic rays and solar energetic particles, but the field levels needed for this to be effective are so large that it probably will not be practical to either generate them or to shield their effects so that other spacecraft systems are not affected.

Return to Ask the Astronomer