Russia plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the solar system’s great gas giant Jupiter in 2030.
Roscosmos, Russia’s Federal Space Agency, announced the plan for last week’s 50-month mammoth trip. The journey takes you on a small tour of the solar system, making pit stops around the moon and Venus, and dropping the spaceship on the way before continuing to Jupiter.
In particular, a “space tug” with a nuclear transport and energy module called Zeus will head for the moon, where a spaceship will separate from it. It will then pass Venus to perform a gravity assist maneuver and drop another spaceship. before venturing to Jupiter and one of its satellites.
“We are now working with the Russian Academy of Sciences to calculate the ballistics and payload of this flight,” Alexander Bloshenko, executive director of long-term programs and science at Roscosmos, told reporters TASS news agency.
Most spaceships use solar panels that convert solar energy into electricity. The deeper a spaceship penetrates the solar system, the further away it is from the sun and the less solar energy is available. While batteries can be used for backup, some missions – such as Cassini and Voyager – were from a thermoelectric radioisotope generator (RTG), a bit like a nuclear battery that uses heat from the radioactive decay of isotopes. However, RTGs are not nuclear reactors A chain reaction does not take place.
In comparison, the new Zeus project is an entire nuclear reactor that uses fission reactions to power the propulsion. In the words of Russian state mediaIt is a “mysterious project in development since 2010”, in which a 500 kilowatt nuclear reactor weighing around 22 tons.
Nuclear-powered space travel offers many advantages over solar-powered space: it is relatively cheap, extremely reliable, and can generate an enormous amount of energy.
The Soviet Union launched a number of nuclear reactors into space during the Cold War RORSAT missions, a series of Soviet nuclear spy satellites launched between 1967 and 1988. On the other hand, the US has only started one: SNAP-10A or SNAPSHOT, a nuclear reactor power system introduced in 1965.
The US has regained interest in nuclear powered space travel over the past few decades. Most recently, the U.S. Agency for Advanced Defense Research Projects (DARPA) hired three private companies – Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics – to develop nuclear fission thermal missiles for use in lunar orbit to demonstrate the technology mentioned above in 2025.
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