A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission

Re:A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission by Rebelgecko on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @03:43PM (#20338717)

I was surprised that they're only expecting 70W by the time the mission actually arrives at Titan. You'd only expect to lose ~1%/year due to decay. I wonder if they'll be mixing new and old plutonium due to availability concerns?

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Re:A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission by hughes on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @03:49PM (#20338778)

They may be reserving a large portion of the generated heat for thermal control. It's extremely cold on Titan.

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Re:A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission by jacobush on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @04:18PM (#20339044)

I guess, but it all (well, 99.999999% and more) gets converted to heat anyway when you use the electricity. So ... I don't understand.

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Re:A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission by lmilcin on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:06PM (#20339821)

I guess the reason might be it is pretty difficult to make efficient conversion from heat to electricity that would also be very reliable.

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Re:A technical look at the Dragonfly Titan mission by velosol on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @04:12PM (#20338986)

They also mentioned decay in the conversion process. I wonder if we have good data on the decay of the thermal-electric converters from missions like Voyager that have traveled through large portions of space or if they're being conservative?

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