Title: The Nuclear Battery Aboard Perseverance, the Next-Gen Mars Rover
Headings: The Nuclear Battery Aboard Perseverance, the Next-Gen Mars Rover
The Nuclear Battery Aboard Perseverance, the Next-Gen Mars Rover
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Content: it will be connected to the rover for the final time on the launch pad atop the mission’s Atlas V launch vehicle in July, before the planned launch of the Mars 2020 mission. Source: NASA
But Perseverance is also especially notable because it will be the first rover to use plutonium created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Oak Ridge is working with INL and Los Alamos national laboratory to help NASA beef up its fuel supply for Pu-238. “ Pu-238 gives off a large amount of heat due to radioactive decay during the course of its 87.7 year half-life,” INL said. While other radioisotopes have been studied and used in the past for radioisotope power systems, Pu-238 has demonstrated the best properties for conversion from heat to electricity for space missions, and it has been used safely since the 1960s. However, while the U.S. has enough plutonium to fuel the space missions scheduled for the next decade, the domestic supply of plutonium is a limited resource. In order to establish a new supply of Pu-238 to enable future NASA missions, Congress directed the DOE to resume Pu-238 production. “To make Pu-238, DOE repurposes some of its stockpile of neptunium-237 (Np-237)—a complicated process, involving experts and equipment at three national laboratories,” INL said. ORNL recently automated part of the production process allowing the lab to produce up to 400 grams of Pu-238 each year, moving closer to NASA’s goal of 1.5 kg per year by 2025.