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Division Spotlight
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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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.
Joao Seco, Nick Depauw, Sylvain Danto, Harald Paganeti, Yoel Fink
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 27-31
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Biology; Radiation Used in Medicine | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12265
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Proton radiography is an imaging technique with potential application in proton radiation therapy. The ability of a proton radiograph to differentiate anatomical features in the thoracic region, such as heart, lung, rib cage, shoulder, etc., was qualitatively investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. A patient with a stage IIIA non-small cell lung cancer tumor located in the right upper lobe and mediastinum was considered for this study. The GEANT4 Monte Carlo toolkit was used to simulate proton transport through a proton nozzle and through the lung area of the patient, registering in a phase-space file the entry and exit energy, position, and motion direction of each proton. The Monte Carlo simulation ran a total of 10 million histories with the highest deliverable energy of 235 MeV at the Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center. The proton radiograph was then generated independently of the Monte Carlo simulation, using a numerical algorithm to input the proton position, direction of motion, and energy kept in the entry and exit phase-space files. The proton radiograph was compared to the standard portal X-ray image for tissue and tumor contrast, and for visibility relative to the background lung tissue. The preliminary results with GEANT4 showed that the proton radiography can produce images with good spatial resolution and excellent soft tissue contrast, resulting in better tumor edge localization within a soft tissue background region such as the lung.