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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
Dmitry V. Paramonov, Mohamed S. El-Genk
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 261-269
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Ya-21u unit of the Soviet-made TOPAZ-II power system has recently been tested at the Thermionic Evaluation Facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A change in the unit performance was measured during these tests. In an attempt to identify the causes of this change performance, data were examined and used to estimate surface properties of electrodes of thermionic fuel elements (TFEs) of the power system. The effective emissivity was estimated at ∼0.03 to 0.035 higher than for as-fabricated TFE and cesiated work functions of the electrodes, which were higher than for as-fabricated TFEs. These changes in the effective emissivity and cesiated work functions, caused by gaseous impurities and air incursion in the TFEs interelectrode gap, lowered both the emitter temperature and the output load voltage thus contributing to the measured decrease in output power.
