An Ecofriendly Way to Convert Waste Heat Into Energy
Perseverance, NASA’s 2020 Mars rover, is powered by something very desirable here on Earth: a thermoelectric device that converts heat to useful electricity.
On Mars, the heat source is the radioactive decay of plutonium, and the device’s conversion efficiency is 4%-5%. That’s good enough to power Perseverance and its operations but not quite good enough for applications on Earth.