NASA Developing Nuclear-Powered Drone for Trip to Titan
In addition to the Moon, NASA has been conducting missions to asteroids, planets, and moons within our solar system. Recently, the US space agency successfully launched the Psyche mission to explore a metal-rich asteroid, and samples from the Bennu asteroid were also brought back to Earth last month. Furthermore, NASA has been diligently working on the Artemis program, which marks their first manned lunar mission since Apollo 17. However, the Dragonfly mission stands out as the most ambitious endeavor yet, as it will be the first-ever mission to land on the surface of an ocean world. As part of this mission, NASA plans to send a spacecraft to Titan, the largest moon of Jupiter.
For the ambitious journey, NASA is developing a nuclear-powered, car-sized drone to help explore Titan’s surface and collect samples.
NASA Dragonfly drone
The Dragonfly is a rotorcraft being developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. According to NASA, it will be equipped with cameras, sensors and samplers that will study the organic material of the collected samples. Based on research, it has been known that the moon may have liquid water under its ice surface.
In a NASA news release, Ken Hibbard, APL’s Dragonfly mission systems engineer, said, “With Dragonfly, we’re turning science fiction into research data. The mission is coming together piece by piece, and we’re excited about each next step toward sending this revolutionary rotorcraft across Titan’s skies and surface.”
The Dragonfly drone will be equipped with four pairs of coaxial rotors to soar through Titan’s dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Mission engineers have completed two test campaigns in NASA Langley’s Subsonic Tunnel, which is used to test computational fluid dynamics models. On the other hand, the two tests performed in the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT) help test the aerodynamic stability of the drone and model the aerodynamics of the Lander’s rotors.
“All test objectives were successfully met, and the data will help increase confidence in our simulation models on Earth before extrapolating to conditions on Titan,” Hibbard added.
What is the Dragonfly mission?
The Dragonfly mission is the fourth mission of NASA’s New Frontiers program. It is a series of space exploration missions designed to improve our understanding of the solar system. It involves sending an unmanned spacecraft to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, which is known to have had organic material on its surface at some point in history. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2027 at the earliest and arrive at Titan in the mid-2030s.
