101–110 of 365 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The radiation emitted by plutonium 238, which is what's found inside RTGs, is easily shielded by essentially any solid material. The real reason you don't want an RTG powering your fridge is that it costs on the order of one million dollars per watt.
Economies of scale would surely change that though?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The radiation emitted by plutonium 238, which is what's found inside RTGs, is easily shielded by essentially any solid material. The real reason you don't want an RTG powering your fridge is that it costs on the order of one million dollars per watt.
Economies of scale would surely change that though?
https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html
https://mjosefweber.medium.com/nasa-needs-plutonium-ea3bbaad...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AKA "Not In My Back Yard." So the question stands and extends to include this: "why not?"
People are probably going to answer “safety”. But it’s also hideously expensive. Plutonium is, apparently, one of the safer ways to build these things, because it is easy to shield, and the power density is good. But plutonium, as it’s not naturally occurring, is stratospherically expensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
I wish I could say that’s a good thing. But no, after the first of them, nuclear weapons seem to have justified their own existence, no matter the cost.
I would rather see remaining weapons material repurposed as deep-space power sources. If that were to solve problems.
Anyhow, Perseverance makes me happy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AKA "Not In My Back Yard." So the question stands and extends to include this: "why not?"
People are probably going to answer “safety”. But it’s also hideously expensive. Plutonium is, apparently, one of the safer ways to build these things, because it is easy to shield, and the power density is good. But plutonium, as it’s not naturally occurring, is stratospherically expensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Note: With alpha emitters, it's 'safe' if it's outside your body, your skin can absorb it. But once you eat or inhale it, you get the full blast right into the quickest dividing cells in your body.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The radiation emitted by plutonium 238, which is what's found inside RTGs, is easily shielded by essentially any solid material. The real reason you don't want an RTG powering your fridge is that it costs on the order of one million dollars per watt.
Economies of scale would surely change that though?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of those effective waste disposal systems in the West, particularly for recycling, consist of paying Asian and African companies to take away the waste, so it can then be dumped in their countries/oceans or get "recycled" in places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie
No, that is not a waste disposal system, it's how tech companies and other companies that sell gadgets fool their eco customers into thinking they are "recycling" something that cannot in principle be safely recycled. It is yet another example of going through a kabuki ritual rather than effectively dealing with the problem.
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Any idea how much storage it has? I would think it'd have to be TBs to store all these images, logs, and other data for years while making sure they have enough memory so that they're not limited and if the rover stays there for longer than intended.
Why would it need to continue to store things after successful receipt on Earth?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's powering Voyager is a plutonium pile. Pretty sure you don't want that in your fridge. 10 billion miles from me? Sure, knock yourself out. 10 feet from me? No way.
The radiation emitted by plutonium 238, which is what's found inside RTGs, is easily shielded by essentially any solid material. The real reason you don't want an RTG powering your fridge is that it costs on the order of one million dollars per watt.
If that shield fails for any reason, including tampering, you're looking at the radiological contamination and likely deaths of everyone nearby at the very least.
Does anyone know what type of data compression is being used to transmit these images? There's been huge progress since the last rover.
They use the same kind of compression as the last mission. JP2, I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 I'm not sure that data compression has progressed that much since Curiosity in 2012 or Insight in 2018. There have been some formats that have improved compression at the expense of large amounts of memory or processing power, but neither of those are abundant on a rad-hardened processor. Neither is elec…
Are they being re-encoded into regular JPG files when being shown online?