Happy Landings Anniversary, Mars Curiosity Rover
A quick note of congratulations to NASA's Mars Curiosity rover project team on the first anniversary of a daredevil landing on Mars on August 6, 2012.
A quick note of congratulations to NASA's Mars Curiosity rover project team on the first anniversary of a daredevil landing on Mars on August 6, 2012.
Jay F. Kunze—ANS member since 1960
We welcome ANS members with long careers in the community to submit their own stories so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories,...
Berkeley Lab’s titanium beam targets one goal: Making the heaviest element yet
A plutonium target bombarded with a beam of titanium-50 in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 88-Inch Cyclotron for 22 days has yielded two atoms of the superheavy element 116, in a...
William A. Anders, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former member of the American Nuclear Society, died on June 7 at 90 years of age.In a June 18 statement, the NRC...
Americium-241 heat source planned for Mars rover in a space exploration first
Europe’s first Mars rover—named Rosalind Franklin—was months away from a planned September launch when the European Space Agency (ESA) convened a meeting a few weeks after Russia’s...
Argonne to investigate Pu chemistry to aid Hanford cleanup
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are investigating the details of plutonium chemistry with the goal of aiding the cleanup of the Hanford Site in...
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket...
How can the nuclear community support space applications?
The most important thing the nuclear community can do to support space nuclear applications is the same thing we must focus on for terrestrial nuclear science: developing the trust of the...
Radiant horizons: Fission surface power on the moon, Mars, and beyond
Imagine what our world would be like today without the benefits of electric energy. Think of the inventions and technologies that never would have been. Think of a world without power grids...
The SNAP-10A reactor power system
Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) was an Atomic Energy Commission program with the goal of producing a portable and dependable power source centered around nuclear technology that...
Nations envision nuclear reactors on the moon
Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced its intention to build a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface in collaboration with the China National Space Administration. According to Roscosmos...