re: #111 Shropshire Slasher

Like its predecessor, Curiosity, Perseverance is nuclear-powered[1]! I know Curiosity had a laser to melt rocks with for spectroscopic purposes, I don’t know if Perseverance has the same warmaking capabilities.

[1] The talking-heads during the NASA launch video went into calm-the-folks-down mode when they were telling us about the radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that provides power for Perseverance and Curiosity. They managed to avoid the word “plutonium” which gets a lot of folks bent out of shape; the RTG uses Pu-238 like all American deep-space mission craft. They did call it a “battery” though which is a pet peeve of mine since it’s a thermally-energised electrical generator rather than a chemical store of electricity.

ESA in Europe are working on using Americium-241 as a RTG heat source — it has some advantages over Pu-238 (cost, production simplicity, availability, generator lifespan etc.) but also disadvantages in terms of mass per watt of electricity produced.