The University of New Mexico Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies has received a grant from NASA’s Cross-Enterprise Technology Development Program, one of 111 selected from a total of more than 1,200 proposals submitted nationwide. The grant request is for $1,006,673 over a three-year period. The goal of the project is to develop and design a high efficiency radioisotope power system for NASA’s future planetary exploration missions. For these missions, solar energy is not a viable power option owing to the distance from the sun and the need to use heavy batteries for energy supply at night, making the solar systems for these missions both prohibitively heavy and large.