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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Gary N. Huffman, Carl J. Kershner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 9 | Number 3 | September 1970 | Pages 434-438
Radioisotope | Symposium on Theoretical Models for Predicting In-Reactor Performance of Fuel and Cladding Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT70-A28798
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The self-absorption alpha range for the 5.5-MeV alpha emission in 238PuO2 was determined to be 11.7 ± 0.2 μm by measurement of the effective activity on microspkerical sources of from 150 to 250 μm diameter. A function was derived and experimentally tested which related the fractional escape of the total alpha emission to the range-radius ratio of the microspherical source. An energy distribution function was also derived for the alpha emission from a microspherical source which agreed quite well with the experimentally determined spectrum above 1 MeV. It is suggested that the derwed function provides a more accurate description of the energy region below 1 MeV than the experimental data.