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Dragonfly mission heads toward PDR, element fabrication from Lockheed Martin set to begin - NASASpaceFlight.com
Dragonfly, NASA’s unique robotic exploration mission using a rotorcraft to fly a science laboratory around…
Dragonfly, NASA’s unique robotic exploration mission using a rotorcraft to fly a science laboratory around the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, is continuing to march through its preliminary design steps.
Rotor design and testing for the craft as well as Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) from Lockheed Martin on the subsystem portions of their contracted elements for Dragonfly are all proceeding ahead of the overall mission-level PDR slated for February 2023.
The Mission
The Dragonfly mission, proposed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), was selected by NASA as the fourth New Frontiers program flight on June 27, 2019.
After arriving on Titan, Dragonfly will fly itself from exploration point to exploration point across a portion of Saturn’s moon. It will utilize vertical takeoffs and landings, a capability recently tested on an extraterrestrial world for the first time by the Ingenuity rotorcraft that rode along to Mars with the Perseverance rover in 2020.
The dual-quadcopter design of Dragonfly, seen in this artist’s render (left to right) in the arrival, landing, and operational phases of its mission on Titan. (Credit: NASA)
Dragonfly will enable an astrobiology mission to assess Titan’s microbial habitability and study its prebiotic chemistry. The mobile nature of the mission will allow sampling from numerous geologically diverse sites.
Titan is a prime target for astrobiologists due to its abundance of complex carbon-rich chemistry and the fact that liquid hydrocarbons exist on its surface. Liquid hydrocarbons hold the possibility of forming a prebiotic primordial soup – a leading theory for how life first emerged on Earth.
