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Prometheus looks to nuke future
By Martin Redfern
BBC radio science unit
Nuclear power would allow missions to orbit - not merely fly by
The US space agency (Nasa) is progressing with ambitious plans to explore the Solar System using nuclear power.
Their hope, eventually, is to use electricity generated by nuclear power to propel a space probe and power its instruments on a voyage to the icy moons of Jupiter, satellites that just possibly might harbour life beneath their ice.
Before then, nuclear technology could be proved with a less ambitious mission, perhaps a nuclear-powered probe to the Moon.
As long ago as 1907, just two years after Einstein discovered his famous equation E=mc2 which hinted at the vast power locked within the atom, Robert Goddard, who was himself to go on to pioneer chemical rockets, wrote: "The navigation of interplanetary space depends for its solution on the problem of atomic disintegration."
Dalje
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