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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.
K. R. O'Kula, W. H. Horton
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 1130-1135
Tritium Safety | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25290
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) of Savannah River Plant (SRP) reactor operation is evaluating the offsite risk due to tritium releases during postulated full or partial loss of heavy water moderator accidents. Preliminary determination of the frequency of average partial moderator loss (including incidents with leaks as small as 0.5 kg) yields an estimate of ∼1 per reactor-year. The full moderator loss frequency is conservatively chosen as 5×10−3 per reactor-year. Conditional consequences, determined with a version of the MACCS code modified to handle tritium, are found to be insignificant. The 95th percentile individual cancer risk is 2×10−8 per reactor-year within 16 km of the release point. The full moderator loss accident contributes about 80% of the evaluated risks. “Nuclear Power Safety Goals in Light of the Chernobyl Accident,” Nucl. Safety, 29(1), 20 (1988).
