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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.
M. M. Menon, P. M. Anderson, C. B. Baxi, A. Langhorn, J. L. Luxon, M. A. Mahdavi, Peter K. Mioduszewski, L. W. Owen, M. J. Schaffer, K. M. Schaubel, J. P. Smith
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 3 | November 1992 | Pages 356-370
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30095
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A particle exhaust scheme using a cryocondensation pump in the advanced divertor configuration of the DIII-D tokamak is described. In this configuration, the pump is located inside a baffle chamber within the tokamak, designed to receive particles reflected off the divertor strike region. A concentric coaxial loop with forced-convection flow of two-phase helium is selected as the cryocondensation surface. The pumping configuration is optimized by Monte Carlo techniques to provide maximum exhaust efficiency while minimizing the deleterious effects of impingement of energetic plasma particles on cryogenic surfaces. Heat loading contributions from various sources on the cryogenic surfaces are estimated, based on which the cryogenic flow loop for the pump is designed. The mechanical aspects of the pump, designed to meet the many challenging requirements of operating the cryopump internal to the tokamak vacuum and in close proximity with the high-temperature plasma, are also outlined.
