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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.
Diethelm Schroeder-Richter, Sabiha Yildiz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 512-518
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30694
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The critical heat flux (CHF) is studied experimentally in vertical tubes heated directly using power current (direct current 2500 A, 15 V) and cooled with water at a low mass flow rate (0 to 0 2 Mg/m2·s) and at low pressure (0.1 to 0.8 MPa). A smooth tube and a tube with a porous coating layer sintered onto the inner surface were used. The tube and the porous coating layer are both made from INCONEL-600. The results (so far at moderate heat fluxes) are compared with each other and with correlations by Katto and by Weber. Enhancement of heat transfer was determined as well as a negative effect of the porous coating below the expected value of CHF. It seems that a disadvantage of the coated tube corresponds to the apparently annular flow regime alone; whereas, the CHFs can be enhanced by the porous layer as long as the bubbly flow pattern is maintained up to the location of maximum heat flux. Obviously, the latter situation is established during high-heat-flux conditions, i.e., at high subcooling and high flow rate, which are the classical design characteristics of high-heat-flux components infusion reactors.
