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.
High-power electricity direct from radiation is the vision of Rads to Watts
You could call it a power contest. Teams picked for a new research program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will compete to design radiovoltaic cells that can...
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in...
Former NASA official discusses the need for nuclear power in space
A recent episode of the podcast Space Minds features a discussion about the uses of nuclear power in space with Bhavya Lal, former associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy...
Looking up: The 2025 NETS conference
The American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS 2025) conference will take place May 4–8 in Huntsville, Ala. Registration for the meeting is now open, and...
NDA funds Plutonium Ceramics Academic Hub with U.K. universities
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has announced that it will establish a Plutonium Ceramics Academic Hub with the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield. The...
Three nations, three ways to recycle plastic waste with nuclear technology
Plastic waste pollutes oceans, streams, and bloodstreams. Nations in Asia and the Pacific are working with the International Atomic Energy Agency through the Nuclear Technology for Controlling...
Senate committee hears from energy secretary nominee Chris Wright
Chris Wright, president-elect Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Energy, spent hours today fielding questions from members of the U.S. Senate’s committee on Energy and Natural...
Westinghouse’s lunar microreactor concept gets a contract for continued R&D
Westinghouse Electric Company announced last week that NASA and the Department of Energy have awarded the company a contract to continue developing a lunar microreactor concept for the Fission...
Jay F. Kunze—ANS member since 1960
We welcome ANS members with long careers in the community to submit their own stories so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories,...
Berkeley Lab’s titanium beam targets one goal: Making the heaviest element yet
A plutonium target bombarded with a beam of titanium-50 in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 88-Inch Cyclotron for 22 days has yielded two atoms of the superheavy element 116, in a...
