Can I ask how everyone personally feels about using nuclear material for space exploration? For the rovers heating elements it will be just a couple of grams but for generating electricity via a RTG a spacecraft would require several kilograms of radioactive material.
Outside an atmosphere like Earth’s, everything is already exposed to intense ionizing radiation from the sun/stars. A bit more from an RTG, even a big one, is a drop in the ocean. If we found signs of extraterrestrial life, then we’d want to be extra cautious about not sterilizing by accident, but that’s not currently a major concern. And of course, any sort of nuclear rocket propulsion would need to be handed with utmost care, but it’s also not a major issue once it’s outside the atmosphere.
It’s fine, both of the last two US Rovers are powered off RTGs and several of the deep space probes run off RTGs also. For low Earth orbit and stuff closer to the sun it doesn’t make sense but going further out and especially in a place like Mars where solar panels are prone to being covered in dust an RTG power source makes sense.
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