The Triton Hopper is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project to design a mission to not merely land, but repeatedly fly across the surface of Triton, utilizing the volatile surface ices (primarily nitrogen) as propellant for a radioisotope-heated thermal rocket engine to launch across the surface and explore all the moon's varied terrain. An engineering design study of the vehicle and mission was done. With a calculated range of 20 km per hop, equator-to-pole mobility can be achieved over a primary mission duration of 2 years. Using Nuclear Electric Propulsion for the transfer vehicle, the same concept can be applied for a mission to the surface of Pluto.
Missions to Triton and Pluto using a Hopper Vehicle with In-Situ Refueling
International Astronautical Congress (IAC) Conference ; 2019 ; Washington, DC, United States
2019-10-21
Conference paper
No indication
English
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