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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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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.
P. Mayo, F. Rodenas, J. M. Campayo, B. Marín, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 48-52
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12268
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The assessment and control of image quality is a fundamental task associated with good practice to guarantee a suitable diagnosis by the radiologist. The need for image quality assessments in radiography is well established, and the use of test phantoms is a common method for this purpose. In this work we present a developed tool that consists of a specific phantom (named RACON) that is used for acceptance and constancy test in order to analyze the image obtained by digital radiographic equipment, software (named SoftRACON) for automated image analysis with digital processing techniques, and a database to store test phantom images and the scoring results.The main objective is to characterize the constancy of the radiographic imaging chain and guarantee acceptable image quality, related to well-functioning of the radiographic equipment. Therefore, the application presented in this work is sensitive enough to the operating conditions of the radiographic digital equipment and allows the assessment of the imaging system quality and, consequently, increases the objectivity (accuracy) in the evaluation of the image.