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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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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.
Keith Searson, Fabrice Fleurot, Andrew Cooper, Pat Cowan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 259-263
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12297
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A computer-aided design (CAD) import and tracking system, OiNC, has been developed that is currently being incorporated into the MONK and MCBEND criticality and shielding codes. The system enables analysts to take advantage of the advanced geometry modeling capabilities provided by the solid CAD modelers Autodesk Inventor and Solidworks. Various tracking acceleration techniques are implemented in order to reduce calculation time, including the full or partial automatic conversion of the CAD model to constructive solid geometry (CSG) form. For the criticality benchmark model detailed here, the overall calculation run time for a CAD-based geometry was found to be just 14% longer than an equivalent text-based CSG model. OiNC uses analytical surface descriptions, with full NURBS support, avoiding the approximations and problems associated with meshing. However, meshed models can still be imported and tracked, enabling shielding and criticality calculations to be performed, for example, on impact simulated finite element models.