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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.
Robert J. Kurzeja, Charles E. Murphy Jr., Robert W. Taylor
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 1111-1114
Tritium Safety | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25287
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An unplanned release of 168,000 Ci of elemental tritium (HT) and 4700 Ci of tritium oxide (HTO) occurred on July 31, 1987 from the Savannah River Plant. The oxide fraction in the exhaust stack was determined to be 2.7%. The air concentrations of HT and HTO were also measured at 43 downwind locations. The oxide fraction varied between 2 and 3% at the plant boundary (12 miles downwind) and between 0.3% and 84% at greater downwind distances (15 to 40 miles). The increased variability of the oxide fraction with downwind distance is attributed to exchange of oxide with surface vegetation and to turbulent transfer between the surface and the boundary layer. These results are relevant to a recent study of HT oxidation based on downwind changes in the HT/HTO ratio (Bardolle, 1981).
