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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.
Akira Suda, Minoru Obara, Akira Noguchi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 3 | May 1987 | Pages 548-559
Technical Paper | KrF Laser | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25035
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Atmospheric pressure operation of the electron-beam (e-beam)-excited KrF laser can greatly reduce the design constraints on a large-aperture laser module in the megajoule-class system as an inertial confinement fusion driver. The krypton-rich and Kr/F2 mixtures are suitable for the atmospheric pressure operation because these can produce high specific output energy without serious reduction of the intrinsic efficiency compared with conventional argon-rich mixtures. A 50-ns e-beam generator was used to pump the KrF laser oscillator by which fundamental studies of the KrF laser with atmospheric pressure krypton-rich mixtures were performed. A larger apparatus, using another 65-ns e-beam generator, demonstrated the specific output energy of 6.6 J/ℓ from a Kr/F2 mixture with an intrinsic efficiency of 6%. The latter apparatus was then used as an oscillator-amplifier system to investigate the amplifier characteristics of the KrF laser because the atmospheric pressure krypton-rich mixture is useful for large amplifier modules. In this oscillator-amplifier experiment, the power efficiency (extracted intensity divided by excitation rate and active length) in excess of 10% was obtained for krypton-rich mixtures.
