Peterson
glowered. The group of engineers he met with—he hadn’t bothered learning their
names, instead calling them by names from The
Fellowship of The Ring—had brought him power calculations for various
batteries, none of which would meet the power requirements necessary for what
Jim Macomber wanted from the nanosats.
“It can’t
be done,” Boromir said. “We could probably get a battery that could meet the
power requirements for half an hour, and hour at most, but to get in the four
to six hour range that you need, is going to mean more cells. More cells means
more mass and a bigger form factor. And if the director wants an entire day’s
worth of transmitting power, over those distances, we’re talking about another
New Horizons probe.”
“You said
that before,” Peterson glowered some more.
“Well,
maybe if—”
“Just shut
up!” Gimli said. “We get it. Stop griping over the batteries and try and come
up with a solution. Miniaturized fission reactor?”
Aragorn, the calmest of the bunch,
shook his head slowly. “The smallest reactor ever made isn’t small enough.”
“What about fuel cells? We only
need it for a few hours,” Gimli offered.
“To handle
that reaction rate, we need to scale it up, and that’s a lot of parts that can
go wrong.”
“So we’re
back to RTG, but that can’t produce enough power without scaling up the size.”
“Not with
plutonium, no,” Arwen said.
Technically
Arwen Evenstar was not part of the fellowship, but the original group didn’t
have any women in it, so Peterson made an exception. Besides, she was married
to Aragorn, so it made sense to name her Arwen.
“Well, what
do you want to use, Strontium? That doesn’t have the same power profile, either,”
Boromir scoffed.
“Plutonium
is useless, really,” she ignored Boromir. “We only use it because of its long
half-life, but, for once, we don’t care about the longevity of the satellite.
So we use Polonium 210.”
“Are you
nuts? Polonium only has a half live of 183 days? There’s no way we can get
enough of it for 1000 nanosats.”
“I don’t
care about that,” Peterson said. “I care about solving the power problem. Did
you run the numbers, will an RTG work with Polonium 210?”
“Well,
because of the higher temperature, we can ditch the thermocouple for a
thermionic converter, which is more efficient. And its power density is phenomenal
compared to Plutonium.”
She made a
gesture on her data slate, sending the calculations to Peterson.
Peterson reviewed
the calculations, letting a small smile come to his face for the first time in
days. “A few grams per nanosat, so we need a few kilograms to make this work,
right?”
“That’s
what I’ve come up with. Of course we’ll have to redesign the RTG from the
ground up for the smaller form factor, but we’ll have plenty of power.
Assuming, of course, that the RTGs are the last component installed in the
nanosats and the launch happens in a matter of days after they’re manufactured.”
“Won’t
work,” Boromir continued shaking his head. “We can’t produce that much Polonium
in bulk.”
God, is this what people feel like dealing
with me? I just want to pop the guy in the mouth.
“That’s Jim
Macomber’s problem,” Peterson said.
“Guess it’s
one of those good news, bad news kinds of things, right?” Aragorn said.