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Shapeshifter to explore Titan + NASA wants to send nuclear rockets to Moon & Mars

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Cool NASA Concept Envisions a Shapeshifting Robot to Explore Saturn’s Moon Titan
https://gizmodo.com/cool-nasa-concept-en...1838527042

EXCERPT: Why send one robot to explore a world when you can send a whole bunch all at once? Such is the thinking behind NASA’s highly conceptual Shapeshifter—a modular, morphing, self-assembling robot capable of deploying several smaller machines. The Shapeshifter concept is currently being developed as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program ... The morphing bot is being designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab by roboticist Ali Agha and his collaborators... This aerial amphibious robot is still in its embryonic stage of development

[...] Indeed, such a contraption would be perfect for Titan ... “We have very limited information about the composition of the surface. Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes—we potentially have all of these, but we don’t know for certain,” said Agha in the NASA release. “So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket.” In its idealized final form, Shapeshifter would be a morphing, modular, self-assembling robot comprised of smaller robots dubbed “cobots.” Every cobot would be equipped with a small propeller, allowing them to move independently of one another. The cobots “could also go spelunking, forming a daisy chain to maintain contact with the surface,” according to NASA. “Or they could transform into a sphere to roll on flat surfaces and conserve energy.” (MORE - details)



NASA wants to send nuclear rockets to the Moon & Mars
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/...-and-mars/

EXCERPT: . . . A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today. But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary.

At the center of NASA’s nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. “You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it’s really hard,” says Emrich. “Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion.”

[...] Let’s get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won’t hoist a rocket into orbit. That’s too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half.

“Many space exploration problems require that high-density power be available at all times, and there is a class of such problems for which nuclear power is the preferred—if not the only— option,” Rex Geveden, a former NASA associate administrator and CEO of the power generation company BWX Technologies, told the National Space Council in August. Geveden’s sentiments were echoed by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who called nuclear propulsion a “game changer” and told Vice President Mike Pence that using fission reactors in space is “an amazing opportunity that the United States should take advantage of.”

It’s not the first time NASA has flirted with nuclear rockets. In the 1960s... The early programs laid the foundation for a nuclear rocket engine; NASA’s next step was to develop the hardware needed to take the engine from theory to reality. ... [In 2018] Congress earmarked $100 million in NASA’s budget for the development of nuclear propulsion technologies. And this year they got another boost when Congress added another $125 million for nuclear propulsion. But before a nuclear rocket engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to overhaul its regulations for launching nuclear materials. (MORE - details)
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