Tag: electricity

Tug-Of-War Magnetism

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I feel like I’ve been covering a lot of stories on magnetic fields over the past few months.  Fields around the Earth, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter’s Moons, and exoplanets are just some of the places in the universe where we are looking at magnetic field behaviour.  The intention is to use our understanding of magnetism to figure out what is inside these worlds, and how they interact with their space environment. You would expect us to understand the Earth’s magnetic field and interior very well, after all, we are stuck here.  But it turns out it’s very difficult to study the interior of...

Starship Fuel for the Future

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For the first time in 30 years, the United States has the capability to produce fuel for deep space missions.  Plutonium-238 is an isotope that produces thermal energy through radioactive decay.  This energy can be converted into electricity and used to power spacecraft systems for decades of flight.  Systems using this isotope include the Viking landers, the Voyager spacecraft, and more recent missions like the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) and New Horizons. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, run by the US Department of Energy, has produced 50 grams of the isotope, amounting to the size of a golf...