<\/p>\n Transporter-17’s Falcon 9<\/a> rocket, which was carrying a total of 81 payloads, lifted off early this morning from the SpaceX<\/a> pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and began delivering its payloads to their various orbits about 50 minutes later.<\/p>\n BOHR is a novel cubesat demonstration mission from City Labs, which is testing out its proprietary “NanoTritium” betavoltaic micropower source in space for the first time. Similar to how spacecraft like NASA’s Voyager<\/a> probes’ radioisotope thermoelectric generators<\/a> produce power from the heat emitted from their plutonium cores, City Lab’s NanoTritium device harnesses the beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which can be converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space,\u201d said City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy in a statement.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n BOHR is designed as a pathfinder mission to test the feasibility of City Labs’ new technology, which is meant to provide continuous power to spacecraft without a reliance on solar energy. Though its tritium core isn’t actually BOHR’s power source \u2014 the cubesat is still dependent on solar power for general operations \u2014 City Labs’ technology could help introduce new vehicles capable of exploring places that current spacecraft can’t operate for long periods of time, like permanently shadowed regions at the moon’s poles.<\/p>\n
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