The Huygens probe, for instance, used batteries to briefly land on Saturn's moon, Titan, in 2005. In other cases, lithium batteries can help power shorter missions on their own. Solar power can also be used to charge batteries in a spacecraft, but the energy source becomes less potent as a spacecraft gets farther from the sun. NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter, for instance, uses solar panels to generate electricity. Most spacecraft get their energy from a few sources: the sun, batteries, or unstable atoms called radioisotopes. Nuclear energy has advantages over solar power in space The mission may ultimately be a precursor to a new frontier of Russian spaceflight: Sputnik reported that Russia is designing a space station that uses the same nuclear-powered technology. During a presentation in Moscow on Saturday, Bloshenko said Roscosmos and the Russian Academy of Sciences are still working to calculate the flight's ballistics, or trajectory, as well as the amount of weight it can carry. The entire mission would last 50 months (a little over four years), according to Alexander Bloshenko, Roscosmos' executive director for long-term programs and science.

The mission plan calls for the spacecraft to approach the moon first, then head toward Venus, where it can use the planet's gravity to shift directions toward its final destination, Jupiter.

It's 'Zeus' module would advance those efforts by using a 500-kilowatt nuclear reactor to propel itself from one planet to the next, according to Russian state news agency Sputnik. Russia, meanwhile, has put more than 30 reactors in space.

Space engineers where to find uranium