Title: Plutonium-238 to help power Perseverance on Mars
Headings: Plutonium-238 to help power Perseverance on Mars
Plutonium-238 to help power Perseverance on Mars
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Content: This accomplishment represents countless hours of work by dedicated ORNL staff, and it's rewarding to see this work come to fruition. Helping NASA in its mission to Mars is a significant moment in the history of the lab." Like other rovers on deep-space missions, Perseverance's traveling power on Mars comes from thermoelectric generators that create electricity from heat generated from the decay of plutonium-238 in the form of oxide ceramic pellets. Pu-238 produces heat as it decays, and the rover's multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator converts that heat into electricity to charge the lithium-ion batteries that move the rover and power the instruments it will use on the surface of the Red Planet. Pu-238 is ideal for deep-space travel because of its long half-life of nearly 88 years, but it has been in short supply. Previously, the U.S. stockpile consisted primarily of Pu-238 produced at the Savannah River nuclear plant in the late 1980s, which has since been decaying away. But U.S. production of Pu-238 ended more than 30 years ago. Pu-238, in pellet form, produces heat that the rover's multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator converts to electricity. Its long half-life makes it ideal for deep-space travel. Credit: