The Mars Society is pleased to announce that Dr. David Poston, the chief designer of NASA’s new Kilopower space nuclear power reactor, will give a plenary talk to the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention, which will be held at the Pasadena Convention Center, August 23-26, 2018. The Kilopower project is a near-term technology effort to develop preliminary concepts and technologies that could be used for an affordable fission nuclear power system to enable long-duration stays on planetary surfaces, including Mars.

Dr. Poston is the leader of the Compact Fission Reactor Design Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is responsible for the design and development of nuclear fission reactors for civilian, NASA and defense applications in space. In this position, Dr. Poston serves as the Chief Reactor Designer for the NASA Kilopower Project, including the DUFF and KRUSTY reactor experiments. His 25 years of space reactor experience has been primarily focused on near-term concepts for solar system exploration (including designs for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune). In addition, Dr. Poston has developed several Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) design concepts for NASA over the past several years.

Prior to his experience at Los Alamos, Dr. Poston worked at GE Nuclear Energy for four years on advanced reactor design. Dr. Poston received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Michigan.

For more details about the 2018 International Mars Society Convention, including online registration and call for papers, please visit our web site (www.marssociety.org). A list of confirmed speakers and a tentative program itinerary will be posted on the web site in the very near future.