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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.
Koichi Maki, Takashi Okazaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 3 | November 1983 | Pages 468-478
Technical Papers | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effects of blanket composition, including materials and their thicknesses, on the tritium breeding ratio in tokamak fusion reactors are investigated for the Li20 blanket having a separable first wall. The sensitivities of the breeding ratio to the thicknesses of the materials for the first wall are estimated as follows (unit: TBR/cm): Ssic= −.05, Scu= −.13, SAl= −.04, Sss= −.03, SHe= 0.0, SD2o= −.02, SH2o= −.09. From these results, aluminum and stainless steel are seen as suitable for such first-wall structural materials as cooling tubes, and heavy water is appropriate for the coolant of the first wall. The lead multiplier of 5-cm thickness is used along with Li20, without 6Li enrichment, as the tritium breeding material. The tritium breeding ratio of the blanket is estimated as 1.08.
