Professor Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho and Dr. Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have been friends and colleagues working in partnership with NASA for many years now. While having dinner together one night, they got into a conversation about Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. With an atmosphere denser than Earth’s, a carbon-rich surface, and the only other known planetary object (other than Earth) with evidence of existing bodies of water, scientists are eager to learn more about Titan. Jason’s and Ralph’s conversation kickstarted a plan to somehow explore the surface of Titan.

Expanding this conversation with other colleagues eventually led to a planned NASA mission called Dragonfly that would utilize drone technology to study Titan’s surface and atmosphere. On July 21, 2021, Professor Barnes as lead author along with Dr. Lorenz and the 8 other mission leadership team members published a paper titled “Science Goals and Objectives for the Dragonfly Titan Rotocraft Relocatable Lander” outlining the mission. The paper opens with an abstract stating, “NASA’s Dragonfly mission will send a rotorcraft lander to the surface of Titan in the mid-2030s.

Dragonfly’s science themes include investigation of Titan’s prebiotic chemistry, habitability, and potential chemical biosignatures from both water-based ‘life as we know it’ (as might occur in the interior mantle ocean, potential cryovolcanic flows, and/or impact melt deposits) and potential ‘life, but not as we know it’ that might use liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent (within Titan’s lakes, seas, and/or aquifers).” The plan is to land the drone in the sand dunes southeast of the Selk Crater in the region of Titan called Shangri-La. But before any of this is possible, Professor Barnes and his colleagues had to develop the right kind of drone for this landmark mission.

Dragonfly is a rotorcraft drone, but as stated on the mission website, “The Dragonfly rotorcraft lander is no ordinary drone. Weighing about 1,900 pounds (875 kilograms), Dragonfly will be about 12.5 feet (3.85 meters) long, 12.5 feet (3.85 meters) wide, and more than 5.5 feet (1.75 meters) tall, carried by eight sets of 53-inch (1.35-meter) long rotors.” The body of the drone is made from aluminum panels and a specially designed aluminum honeycomb fuselage skin. This fuselage is then protected by a polymethacrylimide-based foam covering. For power, the website explains, Dragonfly will have “a 134 ampere-hour battery and multimission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG). Heat from the MMRTG will also enable conductive thermal control on the way to Titan, and convective thermal control when Dragonfly operates at Titan.”

Using NASA’s Deep Space Network, the drone will be able to communicate with teams on Earth. It will navigate with the aid of LiDAR, pressure and wind sensors, cameras, and inertial measurements. The Dragonfly mission is planned to last 3.3 years, and with the drone’s unique traveling capabilities, it will enable it to cover several kilometers per Titan day, the equivalent of 16 days on Earth. It will explore more surface area daily than any other planetary drone.

The drone will also be loaded with an array of equipment for data collection. “Dragonfly’s scientific payload,” the website goes on to say, “will characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry in an environment where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and even search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Titan.” The specific custom-built scientific payload includes DraMS: Mass Spectrometer for analyzing chemicals, DrACO: Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics that will drill and transfer materials to DraMS for testing, DraGMET: Geophysics Meteorology for atmospheric measurements, DraGNS: Gamma-ray and Neutron Spectrometer to measure surface elements, and finally, DragonCam: Camera Suite for surface and aerial imagery.

Towards the end of 2023, the Dragonfly team headed to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to run tests on a model of the drone. These tests are done in the facility’s specialized subsonic wind tunnel that can replicate some of the conditions the drone will face on Titan. The Earth Demonstrator Drone, a half-sized model of the Titan-bound Dragonfly, was mounted in the tunnel and run through a variety of vigorous tests for flight, landing, takeoff, and hovering.

This was the third round of testing for the drone, providing all parties involved with the data needed to move on to the next stage of the mission. On April 16, 2024, NASA confirmed that the Dragonfly mission is ready to enter its final stages of preparation. They proudly announced that this means the drone will be ready to launch as early as 2028. At that point, Dragonfly will begin its 6-year journey to reach Titan in 2034.

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