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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.
William L. Barr, B. Grant Logan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 2 | September 1990 | Pages 251-256
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29297
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new divertor configuration is suggested as a possible solution to the problems of high heat flux and erosion at the divertors in large high-power tokamaks. The proposed configuration is a toroidally symmetrical slot in the divertor that allows part of the edge plasma and most of its power to enter a cavity in a thin annular sheet. The large surface area of the sheet is exposed to interaction with gas in the cavity. This results in radiation and a reflux of fast neutral atoms, both of which transport power to the cavity walls. The heat flux is reduced because the power is spread over a much larger area. Erosion due to sputtering is also reduced because the decreased power flux reduces the sheath potential and, therefore, the average ion impact energy. Sputtering by fast neutrals should not be a serious problem because neutrals are not accelerated by a sheath as are ions. Helium ash and impurity atoms that are ionized within the cavity tend to be trapped there by the electric field that must exist throughout the source region in order to make the removal rates for electrons and ions both equal to the production rate.