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???

[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...

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.

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#