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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 the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Yasuhiro Suzuki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Page 626
Appendix A | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) / Extended Abstracts | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11707
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stellarator and heliotron are alternate candidates for magnetically confined fusion devices. A major difference is the source of the rotational transform [iota] = 1/q. In tokamaks, the rotational transform [iota] is produced by coupling the symmetric toroidal field and the poloidal field produced by the plasma current along the toroidal direction. Strictly speaking, the tokamak configuration can be assumed to be a two-dimensional (2-D) system. Note that the rotational transform does not exist for the vacuum. For stellarator and heliotron configurations, the rotational transform is produced by the shaping of flux surfaces. To shape flux surfaces, the vacuum magnetic field is produced by external coils with helical-winding laws. This means the vacuum magnetic field produced for the vacuum is intrinsically three dimensional (3-D). Thus, the plasma current is not required to make flux surfaces. This characteristic is an advantage. Since the plasma current is not necessary, disruptions do not appear and steady-state operation is possible. However, because of the 3-D plasma responses, experimental and theoretical studies become more complex.
