[Rebelgecko]

I was surprised that they're only expecting 70W by the time the mission actually arrives at Titan. You'd only expect to lose ~1%/year due to decay. I wonder if they'll be mixing new and old plutonium due to availability concerns?

[hughes]

They may be reserving a large portion of the generated heat for thermal control. It's extremely cold on Titan.

[jacobush]

I guess, but it all (well, 99.999999% and more) gets converted to heat anyway when you use the electricity. So ... I don't understand.

[lmilcin]

I guess the reason might be it is pretty difficult to make efficient conversion from heat to electricity that would also be very reliable.

[velosol]

They also mentioned decay in the conversion process. I wonder if we have good data on the decay of the thermal-electric converters from missions like Voyager that have traveled through large portions of space or if they're being conservative?