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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.
Om Prakash Joneja, P. Scherrer, J.-P. Schneeberger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 24 | Number 2 | September 1993 | Pages 180-187
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30224
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the LOTUS facility, an extremely efficient online detector system, based on the detection of the charged particles associated with the 6Li(n, α)t reaction, has been designed, fabricated, and tested. The system offers an interesting possibility for directly measuring the tritium production rate (TPR) at any experimental site. The charged particles emitted in opposite directions can be detected by a double parallel plate ionization chamber (DIC) configuration. The real events are identified by employing a coincidence circuit. The complete fabrication details, testing under different conditions, measurement of TPR, and its comparison with the liquid-scintillation method (LSM) are detailed. The DIC response to thermal neutrons agrees well with the theoretical calculations. Also, the detector system is insensitive to a contact gamma dose rate of 1.3 rem/h. The direct TPR measurements and the salient feature of higher efficiency in comparison with the LSM are demonstrated. The TPR determined by both methods are in excellent agreement.
