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Latest News
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.
N.M. Ghoniem, D.H. Berwald
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 439-444
Materials Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22903
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lifetime estimates of blanket components are extremely useful during the design process of fusion reactor blankets. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis for the performance of HT-9 in the blanket modules of a reference Tandem Mirror Hybrid Reactor (TMHR). We utilize the available data base for HT-9 as well as other ferritic alloys to develop approximate design equations for void swelling, the shift in the ductile-to-brittle-transition temperature (DBTT), and thermal creep rupture at high temperature. HT-9 is used in a relatively low temperature design (below 500°C) to give an allowable design stress on the order of 145 MPa for up to 10 operating years. A minimum structure temperature of 365°C is imposed on the design to ensure a good margin of safety against neutron embrittlement. As an added design feature, the moderate DBTT shifts are almost entirely eliminated by a 450°C anneal for 50–60 hours, once every year. The lifetime of the blanket is estimated to exceed 10 years, and is based on the maximum limit for total elastic plus inelastic strains.