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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.
D. R. Hanchar, M. S. Kazimi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 395-400
Tritium | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22896
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A transient tritium permeation model is developed based on a simplified conceptual DT-fueled fusion reactor design. The major design features in the model are a solid breeder blanket, a low pressure purge gas in the blanket and a high pressure helium primary coolant. Tritium inventory in the breeder is due to diffusive hold-up and solubility effects. Diffusive hold-up is assumed to be the dominant factor in order to separate the solution for the breeder tritium concentration. The model was applied to the STARFIRE-Interim Reference Design, whose system parameters yielded a breeder tritium inventory on the order of grams. The breeder pellets (average radius, 10−3 cm) reach their steady-state tritium content in approximately 4 hours from startup, assuming continuous full power operation. Both the steady-state breeder tritium concentration and the time to reach that steady-state are proportional to the square of the pellet radius.