In order to move to Mars NASA to restart nuclear fission rocket engine research
November 13 news, if NASA wants to reach Mars faster, then it will solve the problems caused by many Mars missions, such as dangerous radiation, space food reserves, and seclusion (due to long-term outliers caused by living alone Anxiety, irritability, etc.) However, current chemical fuel rockets cannot help us to achieve this goal quickly, so a group of engineers began to restart a research engine that was turned off in 1972.
The energy provided by the burning of chemical fuels can send astronauts to the moon, but it will be a long journey to get to Mars with this rocket technology. Although the search for nuclear fission technology can be traced back to the 1950s, it never really flew. In August of this year, NASA announced that it had signed a $18.8 million agreement with atomic energy company BWXT to design fuels and reactors for the Thermonuclear Propulsion System (NTP). This new rocket technology may open a new era in space exploration.
Michael Houts, principal of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center's NTP project, said: "The strength of NTP will allow us to achieve a fast round-trip travel to Mars, and it may help us to create a more advanced system." NTP Rocket Launch The thrust is enough to double the number of chemical rockets. Instead of using oxygen to burn fuel, NTP rockets use nuclear fission reactors as stoves, heating liquid hydrogen and discharging hydrogen as thrust.
The amount of thrust the rocket derives from the propulsion system depends primarily on how fast it ejects particles. According to Vishal Patel, a BWXT company researcher who participated in the foundry, “The thermonuclear propulsion system will allow you to reach Mars faster. It is almost twice as fast as the current rocket. We hope to reduce the time it takes to get to Mars. 3 to 4 months."
Unlike other propulsion system plans that use antimatter or nuclear fusion, researchers have been considering the feasibility of nuclear fission rocket technology. The specific study of this technology began in the 1955 Rover project of the Atomic Energy Commission (3 years before NASA was founded). The project was based on the prototype of the NERVA rocket but later stopped the R&D process in 1972 due to reduced expenditures. At that time, NASA had suspended the production of the Apollo 18-20 spacecraft and the Saturn 5 launch vehicle. NTP technology was briefly revived in the Space Nuclear Heat Propulsion Project (SNTP) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but this project also ran out of investment before flight testing.
John Helmey, head of BWXT's NTP project, said: "The key is that the previous research data on the NERVA rocket was well documented. We didn't start from scratch. We did research based on the research at the time." Internally, BWXT will work on the conceptual design of fuel elements and reactor cores, and this research is now facing several challenges.
Jonathon Witter, chief engineer of BWXT's NTP project, said that the first nuclear test regulations have changed. The potential for radioactive emissions in the engine exhaust means that engineers cannot allow hydrogen to be released into the atmosphere. BWXT plans to test a new method at NASA's Staniss Space Center that will combine hydrogen with oxygen into more easily collected water. Initial small-scale experiments will use non-radioactive hydrogen to test this method of tail gas collection so that radioactive exhaust gas produced during future nuclear tests can be collected using off-the-shelf technology.
According to Witter, engineers are also redesigning the original fuel and using new materials to surround the uranium fuel particles. Because rocket performance is also temperature dependent, BWXT expects that ceramic and tungsten materials will allow the rocket to perform better at higher temperatures. In addition, the NERVA project uses 90% highly enriched uranium, which has reached the weapon level today. BWXT's design will use less than 20% of highly enriched uranium, limiting it to low enriched uranium. Patel said that low-enriched uranium will allow non-governmental organizations to participate in this project and it may change the rules of the game. But the history of the failure of space nuclear technology is unlikely to make NASA successful in its initial mission to Mars.
According to Houts, "NTP is one of several advanced advancement technologies. Scientists have also proposed many designs using chemical fuels and electricity," said Scott Hall, a researcher who recently broke the records of the prototype of the electric propulsion system at the University of Michigan. I'm happy to see these technologies go into space, but these ideas cannot be realized quickly.It may take 15 years to be optimistic, and it may be more than 50 years in fact.As with electric power, nuclear power advancement is very slow but full of potential. And beautiful prospects."
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