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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 29 2018, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-time-go-for-megapower dept.

Initial tests of NASA's Kilopower nuclear power system have been successful, and full-power testing will be done in March. Each Kilopower unit is expected to provide between 1 kW to 10 kW of electric power:

Months-long testing began in November at the energy department's Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations.

A key hurdle for any long-term colony on the surface of a planet or moon, as opposed to NASA's six short lunar surface visits from 1969 to 1972, is possessing a power source strong enough to sustain a base but small and light enough to allow for transport through space. "Mars is a very difficult environment for power systems, with less sunlight than Earth or the moon, very cold nighttime temperatures, very interesting dust storms that can last weeks and months that engulf the entire planet," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "So Kilopower's compact size and robustness allows us to deliver multiple units on a single lander to the surface that provides tens of kilowatts of power," Jurczyk added.

[...] Lee Mason, NASA's principal technologist for power and energy storage, said Mars has been the project's main focus, noting that a human mission likely would require 40 to 50 kilowatts of power. The technology could power habitats and life-support systems, enable astronauts to mine resources, recharge rovers and run processing equipment to transform resources such as ice on the planet into oxygen, water and fuel. It could also potentially augment electrically powered spacecraft propulsion systems on missions to the outer planets.

NASA's next Mars mission is InSight, a stationary lander scheduled to launch in May. It will use two MegaFlex solar arrays from Orbital ATK. NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch in July 2020. It will use 4.8 kg of plutonium dioxide to provide no more than 110 Watts of power.

The Juno mission is the first mission to Jupiter to use solar panels. Juno uses 72 square meters of solar panels to generate a maximum of just 486 Watts at Jupiter. Mars receives about 12 times more solar radiation per m2 than Jupiter. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn both used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). Cassini used three RTGs originally rated for 300 W each. A spare Cassini RTG was used for New Horizons, which provided 245.7 W at launch (~200 W by the Pluto encounter).

The Fission System Gateway to Abundant Power for Exploration

Also at NASA and Popular Science.

Previously: NASA's Kilopower Project Testing a Nuclear Stirling Engine


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:14AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:14AM (#630238) Journal

    For any sort of serious attacks it is both much cheaper and much easier to produce nerve gas or biological weapons.

    If you say so. They also tend to be much less effective. There's something to be said for a man portable weapon that can kill tens of thousands of people instantly. Chemical weapons just don't have that potential, unless you're distributing massive amounts of the poison (say dosing a city's entire subway system at once). Biological weapons have the potential, but obtaining and distributing them is far from easy (even if you have plenty of willing martyrs to spread the disease). And any disease lethal enough to outperform a small fission bomb is likely to be able to wipe out the researchers if even small mistakes are made.

    Having said that: You must have noticed we have not had a single biological or chemical attack take place in any major country that was not state sponsored (usually domestic sponsorship/research, such as the Tuskagee experiments.)

    Nerve gas [wikipedia.org] attack in Tokyo and Salmonella attack [wikipedia.org] in Oregon, US. Both were privately instigated. The anthrax attacks [wikipedia.org] in 2001 were probably private despite using a culture that had been preserved by the US government. Bunch of chemical attacks [johnstonsarchive.net] have happened in the Middle East in recent years that were non-state based, but not what I think you'd consider a major country (Iran and Afghanistan).