US Tests Nuclear Power System To Sustain Astronauts On Mars (reuters.com)

Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface on Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday. Reuters reports: National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA's Kilopower project. 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. NASA's prototype power system uses a uranium-235 reactor core roughly the size of a paper towel roll. 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.

Comments

No Alternatives???

[Vinegar Joe]

I don't understand why they can't use hydro, wind or solar. Does NASA have to subsidize Big Oil and the nuclear industry? Damn you Trump, Damn you! ;)

Re:No Alternatives???

[aevan]

So, napkin math..consider mars has a (thinner) atmosphere, a lil dusty, and is a lot father than us from the sun... how many football fields of solar panels will a habitat require to be operable considering Mar's diminished solar intensity (half), and choice of landing zones (best for light might not be best for base)?

Not saying it's not viable, but they really will need to be frugal with power requirements if they went full solar for the first while. That said, 'why not both'.

Re:No Alternatives???

[Evtim]

Solar? Have you heard of Martian dust storms? Read on:

“Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time,” said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Beyond Mars’ large annual storms are massive storms that occur more rarely but are much larger and more intense.

“Once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them,” Smith said.

Mars’ dust storms aren’t totally innocuous, however. Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.

“If you’ve seen pictures of Curiosity after driving, it’s just filthy,” Smith said. “The dust coats everything and it’s gritty; it gets into mechanical things that move, like gears.”

The possibility of dust settling on and in machinery is a challenge for engineers designing equipment for Mars.

This dust is an especially big problem for solar panels. Even dust devils of only a few feet across -- which are much smaller than traditional storms -- can move enough dust to cover the equipment and decrease the amount of sunlight hitting the panels. Less sunlight means less energy created.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...

Re: No Alternatives???

[c6gunner]

I'm pretty sure you missed his joke.

Either that or he's more retarded than I would think possible ...

Re:No Alternatives???

[Errol backfiring]

The alternatives do exist. I think the main problem is shipping these systems to Mars. For example, in Tamera, Portugal, there is a greenhouse that uses half-permeable mirrors to focus the direct sunlight on tubes filled with (vegetable) oil. This oil is used as a heat buffer and stored in an isolated tank. The oil from the tank is used to cook on, and to run a Striling engine on to produce electricity. The nice thing is that the diffuse light that remains is good for the plants in the greenhouse, while the direct sunlight that is used for the energy generation is the potentially harmful part. It is a beautiful system, but don't even try to calculate how much rocket fuel you would need to ship only the vegetable oil to Mars.

Re:No Alternatives???

[cascadingstylesheet]

Whoosh ...

NASA project: Kilopower

[Anonymous Coward]

There are more information about the Kilopower project at NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/kilopower

Re:Coolant

[ColaMan]

It's not massively powerful, we're talking kilowatts, not megawatts here. Think of the amount of heat that a radiator of a car engine deals with, if that's any help. Possibly might be able to get away with radiators.

Or that waste heat can be used for habitat heating, or you can just bury some pipes and sink that heat into the ground. Might be handy to melt local subsurface ice with perhaps.

Same for the moon.

[DrYak]

And similar problems emerge for the Moon.

Yes, it is roughly the same distance from the sun as Earth is (given that the moon orbits around the later, duh...).
And yes, no significant atmosphere means even more light available to a moon base than to earth surface solar pannels...

But being tidally locked to earth and with a approx 28-day orbit around it means that the Moon base's solar panels are guaranteed to be in the dark for 2 whole weeks (unless you go even more crazy with orbital mirror reflecting light toward the solar panels, etc.)

Batteries could be a solution, adding a nuclear power source to supplement the solar specially during moon night is another.

Stationary Thorium Reactor

[mentil]

Turns out Mars has significant amounts of Thorium, particularly near a latitude recently found to have significant amounts of ice. The ice could be melted by and cool a thorium reactor, and electrolyzed to produce rocket fuel. There's plenty of open space on Mars to put a thorium reactor without any NIMBYs nearby worrying about strong gamma emitters or long-lived nuclear waste contaminating the environment. We could drop a few centrifuges on the planet and run them on solar for years, slowly accumulating usable fissile material before the first astronauts touch down. Of course some infrastructure to load them up would be required... but there's almost certainly going to be a need, for one reason or another, for some type of heavy backhoe drone moving soil around anyway (digging out a pit for a sub-surface habitat, getting to ice deposits, flattening landing zones, etc.)
Of course, by the time NASA gets their ass to Mars, we'll already have fusion reactors.

Re:Stationary Thorium Reactor

[necro81]

We could drop a few centrifuges on the planet and run them on solar for years, slowly accumulating usable fissile material before the first astronauts touch down. Of course some infrastructure to load them up would be required... but there's almost certainly going to be a need, for one reason or another, for some type of heavy backhoe drone moving soil around anyway

although for colonization that approach could make sense (bootstrapping your infrastructure from local materials), as a practical matter it's far more efficient to just bring tens of kg of refined thorium from Earth.

The beautiful thing about nuclear is how little fuel mass you need for the electrical output. The article mentions this kilowatt-class reactor uses a chunk of U235 about the size of a paper towel tube. Measuring a tube nearby tells me that's about 4 cm diameter x 27 cm long, or about 340 cm^3. (Let's assume the slug is pure metal, which it probably isn't, and that there aren't any internal voids, like for the control rod(s).) The density of uranium is really high - 19.1 g/cm^3, comparable to gold, and nearly twice that of lead. Even so, this slug of uranium has a mass of only 6.5 kg. For comparison, the Sojourner Rover we sent to mars had a mass of 11.5 kg.

It's passively cooled

[Cyberax]

This reactor is amazing - it's completely passive. It's self-regulated by thermal expansion of its fuel. There are no moving parts (apart from a heat engine), the reactor is started by removing one control rod and then it just runs on until fuel is exhausted.https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/01/18/2148243/us-tests-nuclear-power-system-to-sustain-astronauts-on-mars#

Re:It's passively cooled

[hey!]

Wouldn't be very exciting in a 1.3 horsepower car.

Re:Coolant

[someoneOtherThanMe]

A car radiator is not really radiating much, it needs airflow. That's why it has a fan.

Neighborhood

[shayd2]

Where can my neighborhood association go to signup for one of these?

The first few will be expensive, so we probably want to wait for the second wave when they go into mass production

Re:No way.

[necro81]

you may be trolling. But just in case you are merely ignorant, and have been living under a rock your whole life:

Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat directly into space. The Curiosity rover on Mars - also nuclear-powered - also uses a passive radiator.

There is water on Mars. That is the conclusion of more than two decades of exploration. (Science: it works, bitches!) Water isn't necessarily abundant (i.e., no oceans or rivers these days), but it is there. Some of it is briny subsurface moisture, most of it is ice, and some is tenuous vapor in the atmosphere. All plans for human exploration and colonization on Mars plan to make use of local water.

The same is true with the Moon: it has water. It's less widespread and abundant, but it is there. The best places to find it appear to be in polar craters that are in near-constant shadow.

rest is easy?

[AutodidactLabrat]

The contact face has to be kept flat to nanometers, while under 300G AND impact with the initiator UNMOVING at the impact point.
Easy?
I call Bullcrap

SPECS !? news for nerds ..

[thygate]

here's some :

A compact, low cost, fission reactor for exploration and science, scalable from 1 kW to 10 kW electric

Novel integration of available U-235 fuel form, passive sodium heat pipes, and flight-ready Stirling convertors

Would provide about 10x more power than the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator

some perspective :

Power systems used on previous robotic missions (e.g. Spirit/Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity) do not provide sufficient power: all less than 200 W

source (with pictures!) : https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...