What if Titan Dragonfly had a Fusion Engine? universetoday storybywill
In their paper, Palusek and his colleagues extended this work to include an aircraft as the payload, which would explore Titan’s atmosphere and surface for years. As Paluszek told Universe Today via email, the key to this spacecraft concept is the PFRC process developed by researchers at the PPPL:
“The Princeton Field Reversed Configuration is a magnetic topology in which fields, produced by antennas, close the field lines in magnetic mirrors. The antennas produce what is called a rotating magnetic field . Fusion takes place in this closed field region. Additional lower-temperature plasma streams around the fusion region produce an exhaust stream with the best exhaust velocity and thrust for a given mission.
“The Titan aircraft is much larger. It provides over 100 kW for experiments. Dragonfly supplies about 70 W. More power means faster data transfer to Earth and a whole new class of high-power instruments. The NASA Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter mission had a similar amount of power, and many novel instruments that required kWs of power were planned.”
Utilizing nuclear power to advance space exploration is something that space agencies have been investigating since the dawn of the Space Age. With the Artemis Program and the return to the Moon in this decade, and missions to Mars and other deep-space destinations in the next, NASA and other space agencies are once again considering potential applications.
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