Oak Ridge fuel powering NASA Rover on Mars trek
The Oak Ridger
The world will be watching as NASA’s Perseverance Rover makes its final descent into Jezero Crater on the surface of Mars Thursday powered by Oak Ridge fuel.
Mars 2020 is the first NASA mission that uses plutonium-238 produced at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Pu-238 encased in iridium-alloy cladding and insulated by carbon-bonded carbon fiber is at the heart of the general purpose heat source module that fuels Perseverance’s multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator. ORNL contributed both of these protective layers as well.
As the material decays, the heat released is converted to electricity, charging the Rover’s batteries and powering the onboard advanced imaging and sensor systems.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) has helped the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory build and implement a pair of high-performance
February 10, 2021
From the helm of a one-of-a-kind organization that brings nuclear fusion and fission expertise together to pave the way to expanding carbon-free energy, Kathy McCarthy can trace the first step of her engineering career back to a childhood fishing trip.
“When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I was fishing with my father, using grasshoppers we had caught as bait. I became frustrated when a bunch of grasshoppers jumped out of the container each time I opened the lid to put one on my hook,” she said. “My dad said, ‘Why don’t we design a device we could build to get out a grasshopper without letting the others escape?’ The realization that I could design and build something to solve a problem planted a seed that later helped lead me into engineering.”
February 9, 2021
A multi-institutional team became the first to generate accurate results from materials science simulations on a quantum computer that can be verified with neutron scattering experiments and other practical techniques.
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Purdue University and D-Wave Systems harnessed the power of quantum annealing, a form of quantum computing, by embedding an existing model into a quantum computer.
Characterizing materials has long been a hallmark of classical supercomputers, which encode information using a binary system of bits that are each assigned a value of either 0 or 1. But quantum computers in this case, D-Wave’s 2000Q – rely on qubits, which can be valued at 0, 1 or both simultaneously because of a quantum mechanical capability known as superposition.