Beyond Nuclear in Space

The solar-powered Rosetta space probe made a successful rendezvous this week with a comet more than 300 million miles from the Sun -- a distance at which nuclear-proponents have for decades insisted solar energy would never work; that nuclear power was necessary.

An article, written by Beyond Nuclear board member Karl Gtrossman and posted on Enformable, describes the Rosetta mission as a "'demonstration' that in space as on Earth solar power is an alternative to dangerous nuclear power." Grossman has long investigated the use of nuclear power in space, authoring "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet" and writing and narrating the TV documentary "Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens" (www.envirovideo.com). The book and TV program reveal how accidents involving the use of nuclear power in space have already occurred including the fall back to Earth of a U.S. satellite with a SNAP-9A plutonium-238 radioisotope thermal generator on board in 1964.

The European Space Agency states on its website,“The solar cells in Rosetta’s solar panels are based on a completely new technology, so-called Low-intensity Low Temperature Cells. Thanks to them, Rosetta is the first space mission to journey beyond the main asteroid belt relying solely on solar cells for power generation. Previous deep-space missions used nuclear RTGs, radioisotope thermal generators. The new solar cells allow Rosetta to operate over 800 million kilometres from the Sun, where levels of sunlight are only 4% those on Earth. The technology will be available for future deep-space, such as ESA’s upcoming Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer...ESA has not developed RTG i.e. nuclear technology, so the agency decided to develop solar cells that could fill the same function.” NASA has begun to follow ESA’s lead.  It went with solar power for its Juno mission to Jupiter that is now underway. Launched in 2011, energized by solar power, the Juno space probe is to arrive at Jupiter in 2016.