Skyfall is happening, and it will get to Mars in a totally new way.
Last summer, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Virginia company AeroVironment unveiled their Skyfall mission concept, which would send six tiny helicopters to explore the skies of Mars.
Today (March 24), NASA announced that it will develop Skyfall for a 2028 launch, and that the mission will journey to the Red Planet on a spacecraft that uses nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) — what NASA is referring to as “the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft.”
NEP systems operate like nuclear power plants here on Earth, relying on an onboard fission reactor. NEP is a fundamentally different technology than radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which have powered the instruments of NASA deep-space probes like Voyager for decades. RTGs use the heat of radioactive decay to generate electricity; they are not involved in propulsion.
“Requiring operating temperatures less than nuclear thermal propulsion, the thermal energy produced by the reactor generates electricity, which is then used to power highly efficient electric thrusters,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the agency’s NEP efforts.