Atomic enery is the only way to explore the stars. People whine about how nuclear energy is unsafe, how if one of these probes were to crash land on Earth that all of us would be dead from cancer in a year, or that we can’t go poluting space with all this radiation (yes, I have spoken with someone that actualy said that).
That’s a load of crap. Space has quite enough radiation of it’s own that us adding to it won’t matter ar all. No, we can’t use that radiation to power our spaceships (yet) but we can build what is called an RTG to generate power for the space craft quite safely. The RTG program was started in the days before Apollo and has been used on various missions including the both Viking Mars landers.
Sending a probe to Pluto is a once in a lifetime chance – unless there is a major breakthrough in the area of propulsion – the planet is just too far away.
I hope that in the next few years more spacecraft are fitted with nuclear power systems so the space craft are not hobbled by an amazingly small power budget. With enough power a probe around Jupiter could send back a thousand times more information and use envasive sensing like deep radar and laser altimiter measuring. Heck, I would’nt be all that amazed if near live video could be sent back from the surface of a distant moon.
A Nuclear Space Battery To Go To Pluto
