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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.
R. J. Knize, J. L. Cecchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 503-510
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-A23228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The salient characteristics of bulk getters are reviewed. The operation of a bulk getter is explained by a theory which incorporates the effects of surface reactions and bulk diffusion. Solutions are summarized for the particular scenarios involving pumping at a constant pressure and desorption at a constant pumping speed. Hydrogen pumping and desorption measurements of ZrAl and ZrVFe bulk getters validate these predictions. From these data it is possible to extract the sticking coefficient, solubility and diffusivity. Using these materials parameters, the performance of the getter can be predicted for any operating regime. Related experiments which examine the isotopic dependence of the hydrogen solubility and a method for achieving the enhanced desorption of a hydrogen isotope are summarized.
