The Plutonium Problem: Who Pays For Space Fuel? (Text or audio)

[jakeXT]

The Plutonium Problem: Who Pays For Space Fuel?

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2011/11/20111108_me_02.mp3?dl=1


November 8, 2011

When NASA's next Mars rover blasts off later this month, the car-sized robot will carry with it nearly eight pounds of a special kind of plutonium fuel that's in short supply.

NASA has relied on that fuel, called plutonium-238, to power robotic missions for five decades.

But with supplies running low, scientists who want the government to make more are finding that it sometimes seems easier to chart a course across the solar system than to navigate the budget process inside Washington, D.C.

Plutonium-238 gives off heat that can be converted to electricity in the cold, dark depths of space. It's not the same plutonium used for bombs. But during the Cold War, the United States did produce this highly toxic stuff in facilities that supported the nuclear weapons program — although those facilities stopped making it in the late 1980s.

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/141931325/the-plutonium-problem-who-pays-for-space-fuel

[bananas]

1. Factual error in the story, we have a solar-powered craft headed for Jupiter right now.

From the story:

If NASA doesn't get it, he says, "then we won't go beyond Mars anymore. We won't be exploring the solar system beyond Mars and the asteroid belt."

That's not true, for example we just launched a solar-powered probe for Jupiter:

Juno is the first mission to Jupiter using solar panels instead of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) used by Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, the Voyager program, Cassini–Huygens, and the Galileo orbiter. Once in orbit around Jupiter, Juno will receive 4% as much sunlight as we do on Earth,<2> but advances made in both solar cell technology and efficiency over the past several decades makes it economically feasible to use solar panels of practical size to provide power at a distance of 5 AU from the Sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_%28spacecraft%29