Batteries for aeronautics and space exploration: Recent developments and future prospects

Aerospace power applications present unique challenges such as temperature fluctuations, rapid gravitational fluctuations, high-energy particles and radiation environments, atomic oxygen, hard-ultraviolet light, thermal management, and the necessity of weight- and space savings. We review a variety of battery technologies for current aeronautics applications, including electric aircraft, high-altitude solar aircraft, and airships. A summary of energy storage options and issues for space exploration missions is also provided to introduce this intriguing topic. Batteries have been successfully demonstrated for numerous exploration missions to several classes of solar system destinations over the past 50 years. Given the broad technology space of battery types and materials, the final sections of this chapter focused on a discussion of several instructive representative missions and practical aspects of batteries (with a focus on rechargeable technologies) for space exploration. The discussion of recent successful and upcoming exploration missions is followed by a brief survey of appropriate battery technologies for specific destinations, a consideration of unique aspects of future missions to asteroids, and ocean worlds, including off-world atmospheric flight exploration, and Venus mission concepts, and ended with some comments on the long-term prospects for humanity to explore and possibly settle in habitable regions of our solar system. The use of local resources may one day enable off-world production of consumables, power components, and structural materials to facilitate the construction of settlements and the exploration of the farthest regions of the solar system. An important take-home lesson is the need to develop energy storage technologies and power systems that can withstand the radiation fluxes and temperature extremes encountered in the solar system; this will be critical for electronic devices, advanced instrumentation, and (small) off-world exploration vehicles.