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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
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
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Andrei I. Nikitenko, Sergey M. Tolokonnikov, Robert Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 385-390
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design and operation of a new “Ballistic Furnace” facility at the Lebedev Physical Institute for producing large plastic shells from solid polystyrene granules is presented, along with the results of the first experimental trials. Good quality shells with diameters up to 1.7 mm have been produced, though surface debris is a serious problem. AFM surface characterization of these shells is presented. The formation of several shells from a single initial granule has been experimentally observed. Based on our initial experimental results, the problems, possible routes to their solution, and other upgrade possibilities for the Ballistic Furnace that will result in improved shell quality will be discussed.
