Early on Monday morning (1:31AM Eastern Daylight Time), after having traveled 352 million miles, NASA's robotic rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down inside the Gale Crater on the surface of Mars. Soon after, it will begin looking for clues about possible early forms of Martian life.
DARPA’s nuclear rocket demo gets a boost from NASA’s Mars ambitions
NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced they will collaborate on plans to launch and test DARPA’s Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations...
Deadline approaching for abstract submissions to the 2023 NETS conference
This year the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS 2023) conference, which will be held May 7–11, 2023, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is focusing on...
Two reports agree: Diverse advanced reactor fuel cycles can succeed
Advanced reactors and small modular reactors with strikingly different coolants and sizes offer an array of different benefits, but when it comes to fuel cycle issues, including spent fuel and...
Artemis I mannequin crew outfitted with dosimeters for trip around the moon
NASA’s Artemis I mission, successfully launched at 1:47 a.m. EST on November 16 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will travel 40,000 miles beyond the moon—farther from Earth than...
GA’s delivery of DRACO nuclear rocket design supports FY 2026 in-orbit demo goal
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) has completed the baseline design of a reactor and engine for a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) rocket and has successfully tested key reactor...
Seeds in space: IAEA/FAO experiment goes the distance for better crops on earth
Seeds from the joint laboratories of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are onboard a Cygnus spacecraft launched from...
On the road to achieving net-zero by midcentury, low- or no-carbon energy sources that slash carbon dioxide emissions are critical weapons. Nevertheless, the role of nuclear energy—the...
Nuclear power’s moonshot: Three teams have one year to design a lunar power reactor
Three teams have been picked to design a fission surface power system that NASA could deploy on the moon by the end of the decade, NASA and Idaho National Laboratory announced today. A fission...
Defense agency invests in fusion- and radioisotope-powered space propulsion
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a Department of Defense organization focused on swiftly putting commercial technology to use in the U.S. military, has awarded contracts for two nuclear...
DOD seeks in-space demo of nuclear rocket engine in FY 2026
The Department of Defense wants to deploy spacecraft in cislunar space—the area between Earth and the moon’s orbit—with thrust and agility that only nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) can...
