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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.
Ubaldo R. Carretta, Ettore Minardi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 320-328
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A20264
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conditions for the existence and accessibility of ignited or subignited deuterium-tritium states are discussed in terms of the performance of the thermonuclear device in tritiumless discharges. The discussion includes the effects of the thermal instability of both the marginally igniting states and the nonstationary states in the start-up phase. These effects are an integral part of the problem of the accessibility to ignition under reliable conditions. Typical examples taken from the next generation of igniting tokamaks are discussed. The necessity of allowing sufficient excursion of the plasma column for a stable drive to ignition by feedback on the vertical field is underlined.
