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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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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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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.
T. D. Kaladze, K. N. Stepanov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 487-495
Alpha Particles in Fusion Research | Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29284
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Damping of small-scale fast magnetosonic waves (FMSWs) in large tokamak plasmas due to cyclotron absorption by a small group of resonance alpha particles (products of the thermonuclear fusion) is determined on the basis of a nonlocal approach. Such a nonlocal approach for the separate modes of a FMSW gives the same expression for the damping coefficient (except for special cases) as obtained in the local approach, although the distribution of high-frequency fields in the cyclotron resonance range may differ greatly. The cyclotron absorption of these waves by alpha particles may be essential, and it competes with electron Cherenkov absorption and cyclotron absorption by ions of other species during plasma heating and maintenance of the current in reactor tokamaks by means of FMSWs.