A sweeping landscape gives way to hills on the colorized horizon in this artistic Mars composite image.

Radioisotope Power Systems

Space nuclear power to explore the deepest, dustiest, darkest, and most distant regions of our solar system and beyond.

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Active Missions

Years in Service at NASA

Active Missions

Artist's rendition of NASA's Voyager spacecraft

RPS — short for radioisotope power systems — are a type of nuclear energy technology that uses heat to produce electric power for operating spacecraft systems and science instruments. That heat is produced by the natural radioactive decay of plutonium-238.

NASA Announces Winners of Power to Explore Challenge

An cartoon-like symbol for nuclear power.

Power to Explore

The winners of NASA’s 2024 Power to Explore Student Challenge are: 9-year-old Raine Lin, 12-year-old Aadya Karthik, and 18-year-old Thomas Liu.

Powered by RPS: Great Shots from Around the Solar System

26 Images

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Earth is a tiny pixel of white in a dusty sunbeam in this image of the vast emptiness of deep space.

Magestic Saturn and its rings are barely illuminated view of the entire planet.

Giant Jupiter is half illuminated by the Sun and its moon Io is a crescent in the foreground. A small glowing volcanic plume is erupting from Io.

The image from NASA's Voyager 2 shows the Great Dark Spot and its companion bright smudge; on the west limb the fast moving bright feature called Scooter and the little dark spot are visible.

Panoramic landscape view from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover

This animation shows a Hexagon-shaped storm rotating on Saturn.

In the early morning hours of July 8, 2015, mission scientists received this new view of Pluto -- the most detailed yet returned by New Horizons. The image was taken on July 7, when the NASA spacecraft was just under 5 million miles 8 million kilometers

This false-color photograph is a composite of 15 images of the Moon taken through three color filters NASA Galileo solid-state imaging system during the spacecraft passage through the Earth-Moon system on December 8, 1992.

This small object in space looks like two pancakes fused together. The smaller one is marked by a large impact crater.

A sequence of 36 drill holes (six across and six down) that show the variety of soil sampled on Mars.

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Why Radioisotope Power Systems?

01
From a Source of Heat Comes Power to Explore
RPS provide electricity and heat that can enable spacecraft to undertake scientific missions to environments beyond the capabilities of solar power, chemical batteries and fuel cells.
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02
A Critical Technology
RPS offer the key advantage of operating continuously over long-duration space missions, largely independent of changes in sunlight, temperature, charged particle radiation, or surface conditions like thick clouds or dust. Some of the excess heat produced by RPS can be used to enable spacecraft systems to operate in extremely cold environments.
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03
A Legacy of Exploration
RPS have enabled NASA's exploration of the solar system since the Apollo era of the late 1960s. Five radioisotope power systems powered missions are currently active.
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