NASA’s Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy, recently announced plans to deploy 100-kilowatt nuclear reactors on the Moon’s surface by 2030, to“Ensure that the United States leads in the field of manned lunar landings.”. But NASA faces new challenges in a number of technical areas, the space website said Aug. 31.
Duffy set a specific timetable for NASA’s previously envisioned nuclear reactor project on the Moon and asked for industry input within 60 days to find companies capable of delivering nuclear reactors to the Moon by 2030. Learning how to use local resources is crucial to sustaining life systems beyond Earth when it comes to deep space exploration, space says, “Starting with the Moon, which is closest to Earth.”. Lunar exploration requires a steady supply of nuclear power because solar cells can not function in the cold and persistent moonlight. NASA plans to prioritize nuclear fission reactors as the power needed to extract and refine lunar resources.
The nuclear reactor could be used as a power source for the U. S.-LED International Moon base to support long-term astronaut stays on the lunar surface. But NASA’s previous plan was to develop a 40-kilowatt-scale lunar surface nuclear fission power system, scheduled to be deployed on the moon in the early 1930s. Today’s nuclear reactors“Double” their power, this means a significant increase in both size and weight, in particular a significant increase in the thickness of the protective barrier, which is a significant challenge to the carrying capacity of existing spacecraft.
The challenges of deploying nuclear reactors on the Moon’s surface don’t stop there. The report said that in order to promote the sustainable exploration of the Moon by Mankind, life support is carried out using local resources such as water and oxygen, and hydrogen and oxygen are used as fuel for spacecraft, the amount of raw materials that need to be brought from the Earth can be greatly reduced, thus significantly reducing costs. NASA now plans to use the electricity from nuclear reactors to make large-scale electrolysis of water to produce enough hydrogen and oxygen. But that means nuclear reactors would have to be located close to water ice on the moon, which could be mined. “NASA currently doesn’t have a map of water ice on the Moon,” he said. The report said that although the international astronomical community has generally believed that there are large amounts of water ice resources in craters in the permanently shadowed regions of the north and south poles of the Moon, previous studies by lunar probes have indirectly provided evidence, but no probe has yet directly sampled and analyzed the Moon’s water ice resources, let alone conducted a full survey of the lunar surface.
The good news, according to the report, is that NASA’s ongoing lunar probe program“Will be able to obtain relatively rapid information on the distribution of water ice on the Moon, helping scientists identify which water ice resources are worth exploring.”. NASA has completed the volatile matter survey polar explorer (Viper-RRB- , an unmanned lunar rover designed to sample and analyze lunar water ice and create the first maps of lunar water resources, it has passed all environmental tests, but is now awaiting a trip to the moon after the program was canceled at the 2024. “With sufficient funding, NASA could have data on the distribution of water ice at the Moon’s north and South Poles within a year or two.”
Moreover, even if NASA does decide where to deploy nuclear reactors on the moon, it will need to ensure that they are adequately protected. As the Moon’s surface is close to vacuum, there is no medium, so nuclear reactors can not release the heat generated by fission reactions to the outside world through thermal convection and heat conduction, and can only dissipate heat through the least efficient thermal radiation, so a nuclear reactor on the Moon’s surface would need a fairly large radiator. And the moon is highly vulnerable to meteorites, so the surface of the nuclear reactor and supporting cooling facilities need additional reinforcement.
And when a spacecraft lands on the Moon’s surface, the wake from the decelerating engines will drive loose lunar soil toward any facility near the landing site. It is found that the edges of lunar soil particles are very sharp, and they are very harmful to the surrounding objects when they are mixed in the high-speed wake. NASA has confirmed that the jet plume could have a serious impact on nearby facilities. In 1969, when the Apollo 12 spacecraft landed about 163 meters from the Explorer 3 probe, American astronauts noticed that the surface of the probe was significantly damaged by the engine wake. The next generation of planned “Artemis” manned lunar landings, with larger lunar landers, will produce a more violent wake impact than the Apollo spacecraft. Therefore, any man-made facilities on the Moon’s surface need to consider the impact of a spacecraft landing. Taking advantage of the natural topography of the Moon’s surface or placing major installations behind giant rocks could be a temporary solution, the report said. Given the importance of nuclear reactors, they need to be deployed away from landing sites. Future lunar bases will also need dedicated launch sites, which will need to be carefully studied in relation to the distance and location of lunar bases and nuclear reactors. (Chan Shan)