NASA is one step closer to sending a drone mission to another world.
Technicians at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland have begun building and testing the nuclear-powered Dragonfly rotorcraftwhich will launch towards the enormous Saturn moon Titanium in 2028.
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“Building a first-of-its-kind vehicle to fly over another ocean world this spring the solar system pushing us to the edge of what’s possible, but that’s exactly why this phase is so exciting,” Turtle added. “The team is doing an outstanding job, and every component we install and every test we run brings us one step closer to launching Dragonfly to Titan.”
The car-sized Dragonfly will be the second rotorcraft to explore the skies of a world beyond Earth. The first was NASA’s March helicopter Ingenuitywhose fuselage was only the size of a purse box. The solar-powered Ingenuity was designed for just a handful of jumps, but survived an ambitious flight campaign that lasted nearly three years, from April 2021 to January 2024.
Building on what NASA has learned, Dragonfly will be bigger – and powered by nuclear power, not the sun. The Titan drone is also a full mission, costing about $3.35 billion; Ingenuity was a technology demonstrator with a price tag of just $85 million.
Dragonfly is expected to launch in 2028 towards Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the second largest satellite in the Solar System, behind Jupiter’s Ganymede. Titan is believed to be rich in the precursor molecules of life as we know it, making it an exciting target for scientists, but it has been studied up close only once – by the European Huygens lander, which survived for a few hours in Titan’s sky and on the surface on January 14, 2005.
After touching down on Titan, Dragonfly aims to “explore a number of different locations to study the chemistry, geology and atmosphere of the terrestrial moon and ultimately advance our understanding of the chemical origins of life,” NASA officials said. But first the assignment must be made ready for space.
At APL, the first weeks of testing will focus on the spacecraft’s integrated electronics module — a sort of “brain” for the mission that focuses on elements such as guidance, navigation and data management — and power switching devices.
Testing and integration is expected to continue into early 2027. The spacecraft will next be sent to Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado for systems testing, before a brief return to APL to assess how Dragonfly will fare in the space environment. APL will send Dragonfly to NASA Kennedy Space Center spring 2028 at the earliest, to launch on board a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Dragonfly’s protective shell for flying through space is also being tested: the shell completed aerodynamic evaluations in wind tunnels at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia and is now in the integration and testing stage at Lockheed Martin. APL is also considering insulating foam intended to prevent Dragonfly from freezing in Titan’s frigid atmosphere, and other elements such as science payloads and flight radios are also coming together.
While there are several years between now and launch, entering the build-and-test phase is a major milestone.
“We’ve spent years designing and refining this amazing rotorcraft on computer screens and in labs, and now we get to bring all these elements together and transform Dragonfly into an actual flight system,” said Annette Dolbow, Dragonfly integration and test manager at APL, in the same statement.
