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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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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.
S.K. Erents
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 453-458
Technical Paper | Selected papers from the Ninth International Vacuum Congress and the Fifth International Conference on Solid Surfaces (Madrid, Spain, September 26-October 1, 1983) | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23221
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasmas produced while using the MkII Bundle Divertor on DITE have been studied using a combined Langmuir/heat flux probe technique. Ion saturation currents and deposited powers to bolometers facing both the ion and electron drift directions have been measured. A substantial depression of the ion flux on the ion side is recorded, which has been explained by the shorter connection length to the divertor target plate. Radial profiles of electron temperature Te, ion temperature Ti, and local plasma density, ne have been calculated from the measurements. These are time resolved and have been studied both before and during neutral beam injection. E-folding lengths for deposited power of ∼ 1.0cm have been measured, but those for ion and electron temperature are much longer. Calculated values of Ti range from 50 to a few hundred eV, those for Te are an order of magnitude lower. An estimate of carbon limiter sputtering has been made which suggests that for the present discharge conditions (plasma current 150 kA, central density 1.5 – 3 × 1019 m−3), the sputtering rises with increasing density during neutral injection, although a fall in Ti is calculated.
