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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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.
Alessandro Dodaro, Franco Vittorio Frazzoli, Romolo Remetti
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 1 | October 2003 | Pages 130-140
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The "angular scanning" method allows both localization of hot spot(s) and the evaluation of the corresponding activity. Taking into account the experimental setup parameters (e.g., drum geometry, drum-detector distance, collimator geometry, etc.), the peak count rate versus the angular displacement is modeled as a theoretical analytical function of three independent variables (unknowns) for each hot spot: the two coordinates of the hot-spot center of mass and the corresponding activity value. Solutions for unknowns are obtained from equating, for each angular displacement, the experimental count rate to the corresponding theoretical one. Such a procedure has been applied to the SRWGA gamma scanner of the Casaccia Research Center utilizing a set of Waste Packages Reference Standards (with different matrices) where the gamma sources in different radial-azimuthal positions can be located.