ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories’ Ron Lipinski received a Secretary of Energy Achievement Award for his role as team lead in the Mars Science Laboratory Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermal Generator team (MSL MMRTG team).
The award is bestowed upon a group or team of Department of Energy employees (federal and contractor) who together accomplished significant achievements on behalf of the department. Individuals and teams are selected by the secretary of energy for the awards.
The team members, including Lipinski, received their awards Thursday via VideoTeleConference and satellite broadcast of DOE’s 35th Anniversary celebration and Secretarial Honor Awards Ceremony.
NASA’s $2.5 billion MSL rover, the largest and most sophisticated vehicle to visit the Red Planet, is powered by a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or MMRTG. The generator turns heat from the decay of 10.6 pounds of plutonium dioxide into 110 watts of electricity to move the rover and run a suite of 10 instruments, which can do things like find water 32 feet below the surface and analyze chemical composition of rocks three car-lengths away.
While the MMRTG significantly increases the rover’s range and lifetime from previous rovers, which relied on solar panels, launching nuclear material, such as the marshmallow-sized plutonium pellets in the generator, requires diligent attention to safety.
The DOE chose Sandia in 2006 to conduct the safety analysis for all nuclear missions. Lipinski is the team leader for Sandia’s safety analysis report.
Between late June and late November of 2011, the Mars Science Laboratory Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator team delivered the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, which launched on Nov. 26, 2011.
Sandia provides probabilities of risk to the decision makers, who decide whether to launch.
“We look at the probabilities of all the different accidents that could happen. Because each event can happen at a particular time and a different way, we simulate the trajectory of a launch,” Lipinski said as the Mars Science Laboratory began its eight-month journey. “There are parameters that represent those times and ways, and we randomly select each of these every time we run the code. We run the code more than a million times, so we build up a large statistical database.”
The team also implemented a documented safety analysis for three temporary nuclear facilities at Kennedy Space Center; implemented a rigorous unreviewed safety question process for DOE, Kennedy Space Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory procedures; and participated in radiological contingency planning and implementation for launch.
“The whole team that worked on this did a spectacular job pulling together everything needed for the phenomena modeling,” Lipinski said.