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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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.
M. E. Fenstermacher, N. A. Uckan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 502-506
Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22913
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A formalism has been developed in terms of a drift kinetic equation with a Fokker-Planck collision operator to calculate alpha particle loss and energy deposition rate coefficients for one position in space and for steady-state operating conditions in an ELMO Bumpy Torus (EBT) reactor. Pitch angle and energy scattering terms were retained in the collision term so that the analysis provides information on alpha particle behavior due to pitch angle scattering into loss regions in velocity space and information on alpha energy deposition during slowing down in the device. A square well magnetic field shape is assumed and the resulting particle loss rates and energy deposition rates are calculated. For typical EBT reactor parameters, results show that while 80-90% of the alpha particles are scattered into a pitch angle loss region and lost from the device, more than 70% of the alpha particle energy is deposited in the core plasma and about 1–2% goes to alphas retained in the plasma as ash. Parametric studies are performed, and the sensitivity to plasma potential, the pitch angle, the width of loss regions, and computational procedures are analyzed.