Resuming Pu-238 Production

摘要

Tucked away in U.S. President Barack Oba-ma's 2010 budget request for the U.S. Department of Energy was a piece of good news for NASA and deep space exploration: S30 million to lay the groundwork for resuming production of plutonium-238, the nuclear fuel that has been used to power deep space probes from Voyagers 1 and 2, launched in 1977 and now venturing beyond the solar system, to the Pluto-bound New Horizons craft, launched in 2006.