First thing, I get emails from NASA about different science projects that they do, and reciently I recieved this one on how quantum entanglement would possibly increase the accuracy of atomic clocks by 1000. Awesome, awesome, I wanna stare at one for 30 billion years to check.
Second, with the recient troubles of Spirit, (even though it's been sending so very beautiful photos. At first when I heard that Spirit was having troubles, I immediatly thought that somehow enough dust had collected on the solar panels that they weren't generating (luckily that isn't it, though now its in trouble and we don't know what to do...hopefully they'll figure out how to fix it). But still, even though it isn't a power problem, the question still stands, why shouldn't we use a different more reliable power source? The solar panels will only allow it to last a few weeks, but if we used a passive nuclear source (heat generated by radiation of plutonium, along with a thermal engine) wouldn't it be able to last much longer? That's what our deep space probes use. It's rather small and light, lasts for a very long time (other Mars missions that used it lasted for months instead of days and weeks), relatively cost effective, as well as safe. the radioactive matter is sealed very well, and in fact we've been able to recover the blackboxes of failed launchs and put them onto the following probe without much maintence, the chance of it falling apart and spreading radiation all over is close to nil, and needless to say, it's ability to explode is nonexistant. I know that there is an envoirnmentalist outcry against it, but yet again, the probability of any radioactive material spreading on Earth or Mars is essentially zero. Satyagraha
Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
Is a nuclear-thermal generator powerful enough for something that's gonna move around on its own? Obviously, space probes don't have that energy requirement.
Posted by HollowEarth (Member # 2586) on :
Didn't the first robo lander (sojourner ? something like that) have some radioactive to keep it up to operating temp? It seems like it did.
I think part of the problem there is complexity and size. With any type of heat->electricity system you're likely to have moving parts, etc. While solarcells are completely soild state, which makes them quick and easy, if rather inefficent to use.