NASA’s Perseverance rover which touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, some 203 days after its launch from Cape Canaveral, is powered by a kind of space nuclear power system, the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), which was developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The World Nuclear Association’s Director General Sama Bilbao y León welcomed this perspective, saying “It is so exciting seeing Perseverance, powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, successfully land on Mars today! This is just one more example of the many ways in which nuclear science and technology contributes to the advancement of humankind,”
On the eve of the Perseverance landing, the DOE said it is working to scale up its production of the MMRTG fuel plutonium-238 (Pu-238) to support NASA’s goal of producing 1.5 kg per year of the material by 2026. Beyond that, the DOE pointed to plans for a Dynamic Radioisotope Power System (RPS) which will use Pu-238 as a heat source and will be designed for a potential lunar demonstration mission by the late 2020s. The DRSP project aims to develop and demonstrate performance of a system that is three times more efficient than the technology used on Perseverance, and can therefore be installed on larger systems for deep space missions.
