Some people in eastern Idaho have built a battery that puts the Energizer Bunny to shame. Most of us think of battery life in terms of hours. But engineers at the Idaho National Lab made one more than nine years ago which is still going strong.
It's now about 3-billion miles away from the nearest recharger. Actually, it's not a battery at all. It's a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, powered by an element you wouldn't want to put in your pocket - plutonium.
The RTG, they call it for short, is powering the New Horizons space probe which will fly very close to the downgraded planet Pluto on Tuesday. The probe was launched in 2006.
Stephen Johnson, director of the INL Space Nuclear lab, said - his words here - it's kind of neat that NASA missions going to planets are armed with power systems made in eastern Idaho.
The space battery puts out about the same power as two 100-watt lightbulbs to run various systems on the probe. Those systems, by the way, include 16 small maneuvering engines built by Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond Washington.
Johnson said he and colleagues who put together the plutonium power unit nearly ten years ago are eagerly awaiting communication from the New Horizons probe - as he put it - a sort of ET phone home scenario."
