Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-07-21

One Turn of the Atom

One gauntleted hand torques the atom into the rust of Mars — the only lamp on a starless night.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Dark airbrushed propaganda-style poster in deep rust and orange: a glowing hexagonal bolt burns like a lamp right of center in a starless Martian night, circled by three luminous elliptical electron rings so it reads as an atom. An open-end wrench grips the bolt, its shaft running down the frame's main diagonal into a huge silhouetted gauntlet fist, and the massive banded forearm enters from the lower-right corner. A soft fan of Deco light rays spreads from the bolt across the sky; a dim ridge line crosses the frame through the glow, carrying tiny silhouettes of a dome, a toothed gear, leaning radiator fins, and three pylons with a sagging power line that runs off the right edge. Every gradient in the image radiates from the single glowing bolt; there are no stars. Purely procedural rendering; no text; nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of nuclear fission power on Mars as a Deco propaganda emblem: a colossal gauntleted hand torques the reactor's atom-bolt into the planet's ridge, and its glow — the only light on a starless night — runs off along a single pylon-strung power line. NASA's KRUSTY test ran a small fission surface reactor in 2018, and its Fission Surface Power project is developing 40-kilowatt-class units for the Moon and then Mars, but no reactor has yet operated there. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
← Previous Next →