India Mulls Using Nuclear Power For Its Chandrayaan-2 Mission To the Moon

MarkWhittington writes: India is preparing its second mission to the moon, the Chandrayaan-2, as Space Insider noted. The mission will consist or an orbiter, a lander, and a rover. It will be launched on an Indian-built Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) in late 2017 or early 2018. Defense Daily reported that officials at the Indian Space Research Organization are mulling making the lunar mission nuclear powered, presumably with plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). RTGs use the heat of the decaying fuel to create electricity. Both the American and the Soviet space programs have used RTGs in their various spacecraft, the most recent one being the New Horizons space probe that recently flew past Pluto.

Comments

238Pu?

[Rei]

Does India actually have a stockpile of 238Pu? If not then where are they supposed to get it in two years? It's not like the world is awash in the stuff, and it takes time to set up a program and make it.

Honestly, Chandrayaan-2 is only a near-Earth mission, and not a super-long one - they don't need a long half-life element like 238Pu. Dirt-cheap 90Sr probably makes more sense, it's a widely available waste product. Or if India really wanted to impress the world, they'd make an actual nuclear reactor for space missions, not just an RTG, and offer to make them for sale to other countries. Russia made a few of them near the end of the Cold War (TOPAZ), but it's anything but off-the-shelf technology today. Another option to do something actually noteworthy would be to make a stirling RTG and leave on the moon, racking up operational hours in a space environment to demonstrate its reliability. A flight-tested stirling RTG would also be something that the west doesn't have.

Moon orbit - why?

[spiritplumber]

We're still at 1AU or thereabouts, isn't it better to use solar panels and save the non-renewable Pu for past-Mars-orbit missions where solar panels won't work?