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On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter space. Seeing our planet from his spaceship, he would have said, "I see the Earth! It's so beautiful."
More than 57 years after this capital flight, space travel continues to generate feelings of excitement, wonder and respect.
Today, the idea of sending humans to Mars is not such a far-fetched proposition. Elon Musk's SpaceX, for example, says it has an "ambitious goal" to send a cargo mission to the Red Planet in 2022. A second mission, carrying both a cargo and its crew, is targeted for 2024.
For its part, NASA, in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Ministry of Energy, is working on a nuclear reactor system that could "allow for long-duration crewed missions on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere. of the".
A light and lightweight fission system, dubbed "Kilopower", can provide up to 10 kilowatts of electrical power. This, says NASA, is "enough to handle several average households," continuously, for "at least 10 years".
Lee Mason is NASA's leading technologist in energy and energy storage. He told CNBC Sustainable Energy why it was so important to develop new sources of energy for spaceflight.
"Most of our current spacecraft are powered by solar panels and batteries that obviously depend on sunlight," he said.
"But we want to go to missions in which there is no sunlight available – craters permanently shaded on the moon, the northern latitudes of Mars where sunlight is very limited," he said. added. "It is in these applications that Kilopower is perfectly displayed."
In May 2018, NASA announced that it had successfully introduced the system, with its KRUSTY experiment (Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology) ending with a full power test lasting 28 hours.
According to NASA, this test simulated a mission and included a start-up of the reactor, a "ramp" ramp-up, continuous operation and closure.
"The test showed that the reactor could do exactly what it needed for a mission: to operate at the required power, to remain stable during all the operations and then to be able to provide all the necessary power for the specific missions to come", said Mark Gibson, chief engineer of Kilopower.
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