/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15417062
>there is no shortage of plutonium
>le Jupiter is the limit of solar power if you assume technology from the 1970s
Fuck you Anton Petrov and your clickbait video, I'M GLAD YOUR SON DIED jk
>>15417065
>solar thermal
Photovoltaics are lighter and actually have no moving parts. Stirling engines like this are an attempt to get around using low efficiency but highly reliable thermocouples and it doesn't scale much beyond 50 kW according the guy who came up with Kilopower. Kilopower isn't piston-free and as per Jeff Foust's recent article on this subject NASA wants to end development of the Dynamic Radioisotope Power System, the replacement of ASRG which had a failed Stirling, so I have no idea what this guy means when he says that this (decades old) technology will soon be used on missions.

On a tangent, despite being a chief solar chad I'm actually a fan of Kilopower and think its one of the few justifiable uses of nuclear in space but I know NASA will either fuck it up technically or drive the cost so high that it's pointless. The big takeaway is that it's not nearly as constricted as RTGs since it doesn't need plutonium or americium and could be made to use low enriched uranium, which comes at the expense of reliability since it's a reactor and not just a pile of hot rocks.