Posted on by Evan Gough

Exploring the Outer Solar System Takes Power, Here’s a Way to Miniaturize Nuclear Batteries for Deep Space

Two features that could be cryovolcanoes exist on Pluto. They lay on either side of heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia in this color-enhanced image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft taken in July 2015. (Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) / Southwest Research Institute (SwRI))
Two features that could be cryovolcanoes exist on Pluto. They lay on either side of heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia in this color-enhanced image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft taken in July 2015. (Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) / Southwest Research Institute (SwRI))

As science and technology advance, we’re asking our space missions to deliver more and more results. NASA’s MSL Curiosity and Perseverance rovers illustrate this fact. Perseverance is an exceptionally exquisite assemblage of technologies. These cutting-edge rovers need a lot of power to fulfill their tasks, and that means bulky and expensive power sources.

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Posted on by Andy Tomaswick

Shrapnel From Relatively Recent Supernovae Found in the Earth’s Crust

A Japanese oil exploration company recently dug up some samples from the Pacific Ocean floor and donated them to researchers.  Those researchers, led by Dr. Anton Wallner at the Australian National University, then found the first ever evidence of a plutonium radioactive isotope that originally came from outer space.  Now scientists are trying to understand what could have created that isotope, and another intriguing extraterrestrial one, and what that might have meant for Earth’s cosmic neighborhood a few million years ago.

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