NASA NUKE MISSION BEGINS

NASA’s nuclear-​​powered mis­sion to Jupiter’s moons is on. The space agency tyes­ter­day handed out a $400 mil­lion con­tract to Northrop Grumman to start work on Project Prometheus, its effort to send an unmanned probe to the moons of Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa.
Under the con­tract, Northrop Grumman will work with a gov­ern­ment team to com­plete the pre­lim­i­nary design for the space­craft. The work includes devel­op­ing hard­ware, soft­ware and test activ­i­ties for the design of the non-​​nuclear por­tion of the space­craft. It also includes devel­op­ing the inter­faces for the space­craft, space reac­tor, and sci­ence instru­ments. The con­trac­tor is respon­si­ble for the inte­gra­tion of government-​​owned and pro­vided tech­nolo­gies into the space­craft. They are also respon­si­ble for assem­bly, inte­gra­tion, and test­ing of the space sys­tem in accor­dance with applic­a­ble gov­ern­ment require­ments.
The gov­ern­ment team will co-​​design the space­craft with the con­trac­tor. NASA will sup­ply the launch vehi­cle. The Department of Energy’s Office of Naval Reactors, Washington, will own and be respon­si­ble for the space reac­tor.
Nice. This was a mis­sion that needed to go for­ward — tight bud­get times or no. Nuclear power may be the best answer for reach­ing the solar system’s outer rim. And the “Galileo space­craft found evi­dence that Jupiter’s large icy moons appear to have three ingre­di­ents con­sid­ered essen­tial for life: water, energy and the nec­es­sary chem­i­cal con­tents,” NASA notes.

September 21st, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.