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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 Hasegawa, Liu Chen, Michael E. Mauel, Harry H. Warren, Sadayoshi Murakami
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 1 | August 1992 | Pages 27-34
Technical Paper | D-3He/Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30050
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An ideal magnetic container for a D-3He fusion reactor must ensure both the stability of the confined plasma and the ability to control the confinement of fusion products. A dipole magnetic field may be suitable for D-3He fusion since it is predicted to be able to confine high-beta plasmas while allowing extraction of the high-energy charged fusion products for direct conversion as well as removal of fusion ash using resonant and / or nonresonant static magnetic perturbations. In a dipole magnetic field, even an equilibrium plasma having a phase-space density satisfying , where ψ is the flux function, has a steep enough pressure prof He for high fusion reactivity within the core yet is stable to low-frequency instabilities for local beta exceeding unity. At the outer wall, the plasma density and temperature can be very low, and stability can be obtained by line-tying or localized magnetic cusps, which can be used for direct conversion. New calculations of fusion product control and plasma stability with isotropic pitch-angle distributions are described. In addition, the parameters of a new, higher field dipole reactor design are discussed.