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Lockheed Martin to Build Nuclear Powered Spacecraft
LouisvilleDebugger writes "The BBC reports that Lockheed Martin have received a $6M contract to develop the nuclear powered
JIMO, or Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. (According to the NASA project site, the first probes would not launch before 2011 due to development lead time.) On arrival at Jupiter, the extra power allows the probe to orbit each of three of the Galilean moons (Ganymede, Callisto, and most challenging from a radiation exposure standpoint, Europa) in turn, presumably helping to establish the possibility of liquid water and hence, life within the Jovian system. JIMO is a sub-project of Project Prometheus, initiated by NASA this year for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear powered and propelled spacecraft may be safely designed and tested."
"JIMO is a sub-project of Project Prometheus, initiated by NASA this year for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear powered and propelled spacecraft may be safely designed and tested."
Do they really think that it can be completely safe? What if it crashes onto earth just after launch? Or it blows up in the air, so radioactive particles get spread all around?
Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
Should that have said 6 Million? You can't build anything these days for 6 million. Hell, payroll alone will be 6 million.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
maybe this thing would have a chance of getting off the ground. Unfortunately the enviroloonies, are so terrified of the word 'nuclear' that any project that has it attached will get protested into the ground...
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Project Orion was the real origin of the concept of using nuclear power in space... and while the political environment changed and didn't allow it to come to being, any of you who've never heard of it and are interested in spaceflight ought to check it out. (The link is just the first link I found on Google, there's actually a great book about it here.
Its nice to see Lockheed Martin has other businesses than building weapons of massdestruction for the US government.
...nuclear-powered space ships should have started launching 10 years ago. So, if Roddenberry's predications continue to be off by 10 years, we should have the eugenics wars soon.
Khan!!!!!!
Why do I h8 apple?
Oh oh, aren't we suppost to leave Europa alone after 2010? The Monolith is going to be pissed!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I didn't know that solar power was too weak beyond the mars orbit to power anything; I would have thought it stronger than that.
Our thick atmosphere filters out so much radiation... I would have thought the vacuum of deep space would have allowed solar power to be more effective at a much greater distance than that.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
On arrival at Jupiter, the extra power allows the probe to orbit each of three of the Galilean moons (Ganymede, Callisto, and most challenging from a radiation exposure standpoint, Europa) in turn, presumably helping to establish the possibility of liquid water and hence, life within the Jovian system.
The probe will then dump its nuclear waste onto these moons, thereby killing that life.
It is probably too soon after Columbia for them to start talking publicly about this kind of project---confidence in NASA isn't exactly at a high now. Nuclear power has already been used for satellites, and there have been some scary moments when these satellites have come back down. This probe, at least, would not be designed to come back to the Earth. But while IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), it seems like launch vehicles still have a dismaying tendency to blow up with some regularity, and if NASA scatters radioactive isotopes all over the place then that could set space exploration back decades. Oh, and kill a lot of stuff.
This post is dedicated to all of those
...a small, strangely coffee-grinder-like device labeled "Mr. Fusion."
The coolest voice ever.
What if the launch goes wrong quite late and the nuclear reactor hits, for example, North-Korea.. That would be quite stressing for diplomats, no?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
The shape of this spacecraft reminds me a bit of another Jupiter mission.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The radiation environment at Europa is a challenge to design around. Sending the craft to Io would probably require so much more radiation shielding for the electronics (ie weight) as to make the mission infeasible.
Also, recent studies have indicated that Callisto and Ganymede might contain subterranean water, making the possibility of life greater there than at Io.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
It looks like nobody has said this yet, so I'll pitch in -- the Cassini space probe, which was launched on October 15, 1997, was also nuclear-powered. There were protests around NASA right before the launch took place, but it went up anyway without a hitch.
According to JPL's Cassini "safety" page, they explain that the probe is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) which provide energy by the natural radioactive decay of Pu-238. This isn't fission or fusion at work, but merely the harvesting of heat generated by the radioactive decay. The big question for environmentalists (and NASA) was whether these RTGs would remain contained in the event of a launch disaster.
The big difference between the RTGs of Cassini and the nuclear technology in JIMO is that JPL wants to have a full-fledged nuclear fission reactor this time around. This would obviously provide a lot more power for the mission, at the expense of extreme public scrutiny. It will be interesting to see how this situation pans out.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Not only is the space program a waste of money
I suppose telecommunications sattelites are a waste of money too?
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
Lots of spacecraft have been nuclear powered. This one will use nuclear energy to create propulsion. That's the new part.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Voyager 1 and 2, and pretty much every other spacecraft thats every gone out beyond Mars' orbit has been powered by RTGs.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Absolutely everywhere on Earth that there is liquid water, there is life. As long as there is liquid water, life can exist in virtually any environment, deriving power from oxygen, sunlight, sulfide, nitrate, whatever. Life can exist under extreme pressure conditions, hyper-saline conditions, even radioactive conditions.
If we found liquid water on Europa and there was no life, an excellent research question would be, "why not? why is Earth special?". So either way, interesting results would be returned.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
>> ...could be hard to get permision to actually launch the vehicle.Couldn't they look more into the use of solar sails rather than possibly polluting space?
Space (i.e., all that exists) is full of radiation. That's how the stars work. Some of the radiation happens to kills humans, some of it happens to keep us warm. The universe doesn't care one way or the other.
Altough a private venture says they will launch a very small sail into orbit this year, they remain untested. We have no hard proof that sails would be an effective way to travel in space. (It's worth noting that no one on Earth is using big kites as a mode of transportation.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Electric Propulsion (Ion Propulsion)
Take Xenon or Krypton, use some electrical energy to ionize it, and use some more electrical energy to propel the ions out the back of your spacecraft much faster than you could ever propel the products of chemical combustion. Thus you get more momentum, gram for gram of propellant, than you would get from chemical propulsion.
Solar electric propulsion has been done before, such as Deep Space 1. But for going out to Jupiter with such a large payload, the Sun's energy is just not enough.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Space exploration via chemical propellants will never be economically viable in the large scale. We simply *must* research and develop much more powerful propulsion systems if we are ever to get off this planet in a big way. And yes, it is dangerous. There will be accidents, and loss of life. As long as this is not the result of negligance or outright stupidity, it is a necessary price we must pay as a species for this knowledge. Prometheus was a superb choice name for this project. Man is literally learning how to tame sunfire. There were countless accidents, mistakes and deaths before we learned how to make large scale passenger transportation by air practical. When the first first commercial jetliner (Dehaviland comet) with pressurized cabins was developed, they found out that the cyclic stresses from the pressure changes caused metal fatigue on the thin outer skin, causing the windows to eventually pop out in flight. Oops... But eventually we got it more or less right.
The same is true with spacecraft. Rocket science IS hard. It will take a lot of trial and error effort before we really learn how to do it right. We are still barely past the equivalent of the Wright brothers era of space exploration.
My rights don't need management.
THE LIABILITY TREATY
The Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, the Liability Treaty, sets the minimum standards for establishing the liability for space faring nations for launch or spaceflight activities which could cause health, property, or environmental damage outside the launching state's borders.
The treaty, written in 1972, assigns the liability for a spacecraft causing damage to the Earth or to an airplane to the launching state regardless of fault. Damaged property must be restored to prior condition in accordance with international law and the principles of justice and equity. If a spacecraft collides with another spacecraft in space the liability is assigned based on the determination of negligence or malicious intent and the damages awarded as determined by international law.
If the launching state wishes to contest the damage award with the damaged state, the Liability Treaty states that both nations should go first through diplomatic channels and, if no satisfaction or resolution is achieved, a claims commission can be established. No case has ever gotten to this point. In fact, there has only been one case handled under the Liability Treaty: Cosmos 954.
Cosmos 954 was a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT) which was powered by a nuclear reactor. Previous Soviet missions using such technology would split the reactor from the parent body of the spacecraft and boost the radioactive material into a higher orbit where the reactor would remain for more than 600 years which was well beyond the life of the radioactive material. Cosmos 954 had a special problem; it went out of control and the technicians were unable to separate the reactor from the spacecraft's parent body.
In late January 1978, Cosmos 954 came crashing into the Great Slave Lake area of Canada spewing debris along a 500 mile footprint. As luck would have it the radioactive portion of the craft fell near a trapper's camp. The trapper looked at the unusual phenomenon and then left it alone. The Canadian Air Force later found the piece and the trapper and took both back to Yellowknife, N.T. where the trapper was found to be in good health and the reactor pieces were impounded. After the cleanup, the Canadian Government sent a $15 million bill to the Soviets. The Soviets paid less than half of this amount and agreed not to take back the spacecraft. The Canadians were happy with the amount they received and were happier still that the Soviets had acknowledged the spacecraft's existence. The Soviets had abided by the Liability Treaty.
For those who wonder why Jupiters moons are interesting, and worth visiting, I'll try to give a brief summary here. JIMO will be visiting Jupiters four Galilean moons, named after their initial discovery by Galileo Galilei (through his now-famous telescope). In order of distance from Jupiter, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
Io is the only moon in the solar system to show volcanic activity; plumes of gas ejected from its volcanos, rising up to 250km above the surface, have been detected from Earth. The energy to keep the interior of Io molten comes from the tidal friction generated as the moon moves through Jupiter's strong gravitation field. Io is a great laboratory for understanding volcanic activity in general.
Europa, the next moon out, is one of the most likely places for life to exist in the Solar System (excepting, of course, Earth). Images of the moon reveal a very smooth surface (in fact, the smoothest in the Solar System), criss-crossed by long, narrow, straight features. These features appear to be fissures in the surface; combined with the fact that the surface is almost pure ice (which we know from spectroscopy studies), it appears that Europa may have a large sub-surface ocean of liquid water, covered by a crust of ice.
Support for the existence of this ocean comes from the discovery of ice rafts on the surface, much like found in polar regions on Earth, and from the detection of a weak magnetic field by the Galileo spacecraft. Europa is too small to have its own magnetic field, but if it contains a large quantity of conducting fluid (such as water with a high concentration of dissolved minerals), then its motion through Jupiters magnetic field will generate a field of its own.
The significance of the sub-surface water on Europa is that liquid water is one of the principal prerequesites for life (as we know it). Speculation as to whether life does indeed exist on Europa is ongoing; to find out, a cryobot/hydrobot mission to the moon is required. The cryobot would melt its way through the icy crust, and the hydrobot would descend through this hole and explore the oceans underneath. Interest incryobot/hydrobot technology was spurred on by the discovery of Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, which is trapped under 2km of ice sheet, and may contain prehistoric lifeforms.
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, larger even than the planet Mercury. Both Ganymede and Callisto have heavily-cratered surfaces, indicative of millenia of meteorite bombardment. Both are a mixture of rock and ice, although the detection of a weak magnetic field around Callisto indicates that it may have a sub-surface ocean, like Europa. The existence of this ocean is puzzling, since Callisto is too far from Jupiter for tidal heating to be able to melt ice. Some have suggested that Calliso's ocean contains an antifreeze (maybe ammonia), which keeps the water liquid well below its normal solidification temperature.
IMHO, I think Europa is the jewel in the crown of the Galilean moons, due to the possibility that life may exist there. Unfortunately, as one can tell from JIMO's full name (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), there are no plans to land on this fascinating world. In "2010: Odyssey Two", Arthur C. Clarke writes about a manned landing on Europa which discovers life; it would be great for me to see this happen in my lifetime, let alone by 2010.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Something like this
The idea is to use something like hydrogen that when exposed to the reactor will couse great amounts of energy to be expeled useing a minimum amount of fuel
Actually there are two main types of nuclear propulsion...
Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) - Heat hydrogen and pass it by the reactor to heat it, then expel it.
Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP) - Ion propulsion, like Deep Space 1, except you have much more energy with a nuclear reactor than you would with solar arrays of a feasible size.
Both these methods are more efficient than chemical propulsion. NTP has much higher thrust than NEP, but NEP is much more efficient than NTP. So itll take longer to get where youre going with NEP, but youll use less propellant.
JIMO is using NEP, not NTP. To my knowledge, NTP has yet to be tested in space, although its been tested many times on the ground.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Oh, and for all those who believe that we should be designing a manned mission to Mars, let me be perfectly clear:
The only way we will get humans to Mars will be using nuclear propulsion and nuclear power sources(RTGs). Period.
And for those who question the safety of launching RTGs... this link describes the cases where this has already happened. RTGs have survived abort detonations of REAL missions right after launch with no radiation leakage. They have also survived re-entry (Apollo 13) with no leakage. The safety technology is mature and works.
This is our only ticket for orbitter missions to the outer planets.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Greenpeace reports that between 1950 and 1993 there have been 380 nuclear weapons accidents, some involving the accidental "dirty bomb" incidents, such as the dispersion of nuclear materials over Palomares in southern Spain.
Now according to the the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository who studied the Palomares incident as well as many other cases, a 78 year old person with elevated Pu in their bones will only have a 0.14285 probability of dying this year, whereas a normal american 78 year old will have an average probaility of dying this year of 0.12780.
We're already dropping nuclear material all over ourselves, and for the most part, you aren't going to hear about it until it's declassified.
Furthermore, have you been to Hiroshima and stood under the peace dome? Have you seen the children playing in the schools at Nagasaki?
The oppertunites for using peaceful nuclear power to explore space far outweigh the risks. Those accidents haven't degraded my environmental quality. I'm sure that a deliberate attack on myself would, but even that will heal with time.
We are talking about the power to reach out and travel the cosmos.
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america.
When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
If we don't have deep space capability, then we are dead meat when we come across those who do. Especially if they are ex-earth colonists who decide to return. No chance of benevolance through alien genetics there.
There's more information on space-based reactors to b e used in the Jupiter mission at:
s .h tm
http://spacescience.nasa.gov/missions/prometheu
The reactor uses slightly enriched uranium, not plutonium, and is launched 'cold'. The uranium 'fuel' is much less toxic than plutonium. This type of fuel cannot be used to construct a fission bomb, as it contains far too low a concentration of U-235 to produce a nuclear explosion.
The reactor is launched 'cold', in a shut down state. That means that during launch, there will be no fission reaction products present. The reaction products are the biggest hazard with nuclear fuel, being both radioactive and chemically reactive, prone to dispersing throughout an environment if released. (Radioactive iodine and cesium isotopes being probably the best known examples.) The reactor is not started up until the spacecraft is on an interplanetary trajectory.
This is not a new technology. The SNAP-10A space reactor power system was launched in 1965. Methods for protecting and encapsulating the fuel elements to prevent dispersal or leakage are well known and tested. (These methods will survive explosions during the launch, as well as uncontrolled re-entry from orbit.)
... but but this would be more of a biological mission. It's not a question of power, remember the probe's sensors would be radiation hardened, not radiation proof. Every second these sensors work in the high radiation Jovian environment is one less second left in their life span. Even a one week orbit of Io is one week less (plus wasted transit time and fuel) spent studying Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, which are far more interesting from the (exo)biologist's viewpoint.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Considering both spacecraft were nuclear powered, the similarity is not too surprising. There's a nuclear power plant and some form of nuclear electric propulsion system at one end, a long boom, with heat radiators (the heat 'sink' for the power plant), and a bunch of stuff that we don't want close to a running reactor at the other end.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet. Considering that $6M is chump change for anything NASA does and also considering that the
NERVA nuclear rocket project was started over 40 years ago I wonder how much actual invention is going to happen here or if somebody us just going to pick up the remaining pieces of NERVA.
...is that the radiactivity and hence dose rate from a nuclear reactor is pretty negligible until it has gone critical (i.e. started) for the first time. I'm assuming this thing would be launched into earth orbit using conventional rockets (i.e. chemicals), or built in orbit, and the nuclear engine would not be started until it was at a safe distance from earth (or until escape velovity had been achieved). I imagine that at that sort of distance the gamma rays from the engine would be barely detectable from the earth's surface, if at all. Compared to what you recieve naturally from the Sun, space and the earth, that truly is a negligible amount. I was a nuclear engineer.
Stick Men
As mentioned earlier, there seems to be some confusion about what sort of nuclear power we are talking about.
There are three types of nuclear "power" sources in space.
Radioisotope power- this generates electricity because the decay of the isotope heats a thermocouple junction that generates a voltage. I'll bet this is the kind they are using on the spacecraft in question, and it has been used on many other spacecraft, including the Voyager series. Not much isotope is needed, so even if the spacecraft crashes, minimal contamination would occur.
Nuclear reactor power- another way to generate electricity in space is to have a full fledged nuclear reactor onboard the spacecraft. These designs are *very* cool. Generally they use liquid sodium as the conduction medium. Remember, mass is the determining factor in the design. To my knowledge these have never been actually used in space.
Nuclear powered rocket- the most cool rocket ever. Uses a nuclear reactor, that has hydrogen gas "fuel" running through it, superheating that gas. The gas is then ejected out the nozzle at super high speed to provide thrust. There is no electricity generation involved. As mentioned earlier, these rockets are banned by a treaty. None have every launched to my knowledge.
Both the airforce and the army tried building reactors (so far the marines are the only branch that haven't). The airforce one IIRC didn't get past the design phase for a few reasons: They couldn't provide enough shielding w/o excessive weight, and they couldn't ensure that if the plane were shot down there wouldn't be a massive amouunt of contamination. Be that as it may, those reactors were meant to fly huge bombers 24/7 arounnd the Soviet Union...they become moot with the advent of ICBMs.
Now the army reactor....it was a spectacular failure (ie, it failed spectacularly). One poor guy got pinned to the roof by a control rod! (They had been doing some repairs, and some genius decided to raise a control rod...startup rate went ballistic, water (I believe it was a water reactor) flashed to steam, and other very very bad things. When I was going through power school, it used to be the running joke as to why the army shouldn't run reactors. Anyway, their reactors were intended to power a forward deployed base. They'd just fly in the parts and flip the switch.
SL-1 (army) link: http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm
The reason these reactors are feasible for space i due to the fact that...it's space. There won't be any people around, so you only need to shield the instruments. Between that and the small size of the reactor (in terms of power), very little shielding is required.
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
I think the anti-nuclear crowd have NO understanding of nuclear power, to say the least.
Let's take a look at Chernobyl, the anti-nuke crowd's favorite example of nuclear hazards. There were two major things about that disaster: 1) there was NO containment structure to keep the radioactive particle release to a reasonable level if something did go wrong, and 2) the reactor's design was an inherently unsafe design to start with. That ill-advised test caused the fissile material to overheat, and when they tried to moderate it with graphite rods the result was a major explosion of radioactive materials into the air.
The latest in nuclear reactor designs (the pebble-bed reactor) is vastly more safer than previous nuclear reactors, since by design it is nearly impossible to melt down the fissile material in the reactor itself. Also, unlike older reactor designs the pebble-bed reactor doesn't need massive cooling structures, which adds a lot to the cost of construction. Because of its inherent safety, that's why the Prometheus reactors for space use will be pebble-bed units, which don't need to be large-sized units like the old NERVA engines tested during the 1960's.
And they certainly don't understand nuclear waste storage, either. Today, nuclear waste can be made much less dangerous by mixing the waste with glass (which right there cuts the radioactive output significantly) and then stored in disused salt mines and/or salt domes above spent oil fields. Given that salt is an excellent absorber of radiation, that cuts the radioactive risk even further. In many cases, the higher-level radioactive waste could be re-processed into new nuclear fuel or create nuclear materials for radiotherapy cancer treatments.
New you know why I detest the anti-nuclear crowd in many ways. (getting off soapbox)
You should read this article called: Opening the Next Frontier. Shows, step by step how we could expand outwards into the next big frontier... Space, using nuclear powered ships.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.