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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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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.
Tore Supra Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 417-448
Technical Paper | First-Wall Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30688
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In view of high-power, long-pulse steady-state operation, Tore Supra has incorporated in its design the active control of heat and particles in a realistic environment. In the early experimental phase of Tore Supra, the first generation of plasma-facing components was tested, and these tests provided much physics and technological information and illuminated various operational difficulties. In particular, these experiments revealed the weakness of the graphite-to-metal brazing process originally adopted for actively cooled high-heat-flux components. Consequently, a new inner-wall technology was developed in 1994 and is to be tested in 1995–1996 with a totally rebuilt 40-deg toroidal sector. A carbon-fiber—reinforced carbon-metal compound is based on the newest brazing technology and rigorous quality control. Components such as the toroidal pump limiter and the guard limiters of plasma-heating antennas are being developed in the same way. For structures where brazing is difficult, boron carbide-coated components have been developed and installed in Tore Supra. For lower heat fluxes, a bolted concept has been designed and tested. The influence of inner-first-wall misalignment in Tore Supra on the power exhaust limitation of brazed components has been studied. Results from the technological development for the different power exhaust systems and the associated experimental knowledge obtained during plasma operation in Tore Supra are presented.