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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.
L. Bromberg, D. Cohn, J.E.C. Williams, D.L. Jassby, M. Okabayashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 1013-1018
Next-Generation Devices | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22991
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We describe a design concept for a tokamak that has the capability of sustained ignited operation and utilizes high performance copper plate magnets to minimize size and cost. We refer to this device as LITE for long-pulse ignited test experiment. LITE is designed so that it could be located in the TFTR Test Cell, so that substantial cost savings can be realized. Two design options are considered. Illustrative parameters for the lower beta option (LITE-1) are a major radius of 2.7 m, a maximum magnetic field on axis of 8.1 T, and <β> = 0.05. Steadystate water cooling would be used for nominal DT operation and for very long pulse hydrogen operation. Inertial cooling with liquid nitrogen could be employed for a relatively small number of pulses to provide the highest magnetic fields and ignition margins. The second option (LITE- 2) makes use of a highly shaped plasma to obtain high beta (> 10%) operation. The LITE-2 concept is at a very early stage, so that emphasis in this paper is on the description of LITE-1.