NASA preparing nuclear-powered drone for mission to Saturn’s moon Titan
Not just the Moon, but NASA has been sending missions to asteroids, other planets, and even other moons in the solar system as of late. The US space agency recently launched the Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid, while the collected samples from the Bennu asteroid also returned to Earth last month. It has also been working on the Artemis program, NASA's first manned lunar mission since Apollo 17. However, perhaps the most ambitious mission is the Dragonfly, the first-ever mission to the surface of another ocean world. As part of it, NASA will send a spacecraft to Titan, Jupiter's largest moon.
In preparation for the ambitious journey, NASA is developing a nuclear-powered, car-sized drone that will help study the surface of Titan as well as collect samples from it.
The Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander in development led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. According to NASA, it will be equipped with cameras, sensors and samplers to examine the organic materials from the samples collected. Through studies, it has been known that the moon may have liquid water beneath its icy surface.
In a NASA release, Ken Hibbard, Dragonfly mission systems engineer at APL said, “With Dragonfly, we're turning science fiction into exploration fact. The mission is coming together piece by piece, and we're excited for every next step toward sending this revolutionary rotorcraft across the skies and surface of Titan.”
To soar through Titan's dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, the Dragonfly drone will be equipped with four pairs of coaxial rotors. Mission engineers have conducted two test campaigns in NASA Langley's Subsonic Tunnel which is used to test the computational fluid dynamics models. On the other
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